Anthropic says Claude designed quantum circuits that beat the best published designs

Anthropic said on 16 October that its Claude Mythos 5 model, given plain-language specifications for eight quantum circuits drawn from chemistry, optimisation, physics simulation and number theory, together with an automated evaluator that checks and scores each design, found designs that improve on the best published circuits, in some cases by an order of magnitude or more. Anthropic says Claude worked in a closed loop with no human input between rounds and, across the eight tasks, found designs that used both fewer qubits and fewer gates than the best previously published algorithms. On elliptic-curve point addition, a standard benchmark, Claude worked for 53 hours with minimal human input and produced what Anthropic describes as the first reversible implementation of the "divsteps" method with no stored branch history; compared with the smallest previous design, one circuit in the resulting family uses 12% more qubits but 17x fewer gates. Another design makes the costliest step of decoded quantum interferometry, a leading quantum optimisation algorithm, about 12x cheaper. The work was led through Anthropic's STEM Fellows Program in collaboration with researchers from Harvard University and QuEra Computing, and the full paper is on arXiv.

What it means for business: Anthropic says lower circuit costs reduce the quantum resources useful applications need, so practical quantum computers could arrive sooner than previously expected; organisations tracking quantum risks to elliptic-curve cryptography may want to watch how resource estimates change.