Anthropic says Claude Mythos 5 designed quantum circuits beating published designs

Anthropic says its STEM Fellows Program used Claude Mythos 5 to design quantum circuits that use fewer qubits and fewer gates than the best previously published designs across eight computational primitives, including chemistry, optimization, quantum simulation, number theory and numerical computing.

In one case, a reversible divsteps modular inversion design used 17 times fewer gates than the smallest previous design, at 12% more qubits.

Anthropic says Claude worked in a closed loop with an external evaluator, proposing a design, receiving a score, and revising, with no human input between rounds. A later report citing Andi Gu, a Harvard physics researcher who tested the model through the program, says Claude beat human records in most of the eight tasks, with the designs written as code.

Anthropic says more efficient circuits would reduce the resources quantum algorithms need, which could bring applications in chemistry and materials science closer. No independent evaluation of the circuits is cited in the reports.