❯ Anthropic: quantum circuits designed by Claude Mythos 5 cut gate counts by up to 17x, beating the best published designs

Gains on all eight tasksAnthropic said on October 16 that Claude Mythos 5, working from plain-language briefs, designed quantum circuits for eight basic operations across chemistry, optimization, quantum simulation, number theory and numerical computing. Every one improved on published designs, some by an order of magnitude or more. A paper is on arXiv.

Two standout casesFor elliptic-curve point addition, one Claude design uses 12% more qubits but 17x fewer gates. For the decoder in decoded quantum interferometry, its version uses about 12x fewer gates than Google Quantum AI’s earlier construction. Gate count is roughly the number of operations a circuit must run, so fewer gates means cheaper execution on future machines. Claude proposed designs as code while an automated evaluator checked correctness and scored them, with no human input between rounds; the point-addition task ran for 53 hours straight.

Steps still to goThe work came through Anthropic’s STEM Fellows Program. The Crypto Times reports it was led by researcher Andi Gu, with Harvard’s Mikhail Lukin among the collaborators. Anthropic notes the results use a qubits-times-gates proxy rather than real hardware runs, and error correction and hardware control remain unsolved.

▮ SIGNALResearch problems where an automated checker can strictly judge right from wrong are becoming the place where large models most readily produce real results.