Anthropic pushes into physical world with new standard to help AI agents operate machines

Anthropic on Thursday announced a new interface that will make it simpler for AI agents to operate and communicate with machinery, as the artificial intelligence giant pushes into the physical world.

The Model Hardware Standard (MHS) is designed to work with any device that has a programmable interface, including those used in scientific research and advanced manufacturing, Anthropic said. Users can think about it like a USB-C chord, which standardizes how information is transmitted between devices.

"We built this for science to sort of show the promise of AI, but there's also huge benefits here for enterprise and for industry," Elizabeth Kelly, head of beneficial deployments at Anthropic, told CNBC in an interview.

The announcement signals that Anthropic is wading deeper into hardware, where rivals including OpenAI and Amazon have spent billions of dollars designing AI-native devices and manufacturing tools. Anthropic is building out a silicon team to design custom chips for its models and recently hired Caitlin Kalinowski, a hardware executive who previously worked at OpenAI, Meta and Apple, according to LinkedIn.