Anthropic previews MHS standard for AI agents that operate machines

Anthropic PBC today previewed a standard that makes it easier for artificial intelligence agents to control machines such as microscopes.

The Model Hardware Standard, or MHS, is the fruit of a collaboration between the Claude developer and medical research institute HHMI. Anthropic has so far made the technology accessible only to a limited number of partners. It will work with those early adopters to develop safety features before making MHS broadly available.

The scientific instruments in a lab must precisely coordinate their work to avoid errors. For example, measuring the number of proteins in a biological sample requires multiple machines to process the object in a specific order. Implementing such automation workflows requires researchers to write custom code.

Writing code for scientific instruments is difficult because each machine has a different application programming interface. Researchers must individually learn each API. Furthermore, they must account for the fact that those APIs often aren’t compatible. One machine may only support Python code while another might use Java.

MHS aims to ease scientific instrument programming by replacing disparate device-specific APIs with a single, unified interface. That interface provides a standardized set of configuration commands. Coordinating machines that all take the same commands is simpler than navigating device-specific configuration rules.