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Sunday, October 18, 2026

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Research · Sunday, October 18, 2026

Anthropic says Claude designed tighter quantum circuits

The File desk · Oct 18, 2026, 11:30 AM UTC

Status

Confirmed as Anthropic's research post of Oct. 16. The circuit claims are the company's. This desk did not rerun the designs.
  • Confirmed
    Anthropic posted that Claude found quantum-circuit designs it says beat published ones.
  • Partially confirmed
    One design, the company says, uses 12 percent more qubits and 17 times fewer gates than the smallest previous design.
Anthropic said Friday that Claude drew quantum-computer circuits tighter than the ones already published. The company says the model did most of the searching itself. Those results are Anthropic's claims.1
The post says the new designs improve on the best published circuits, in some cases by an order of magnitude or more.
One circuit in the family, Anthropic says, uses more qubits and many fewer gates than the smallest design before it.2
Andi Gu led the work, with STEM fellows and with Harvard researchers Susanne Yelin and Mikhail Lukin.

Notes

  1. 1.Anthropic, “Designing more efficient quantum circuits with Claude,” Oct. 16, 2026. “Working largely on its own, Claude found designs that improve on the best published circuits, in some cases by an order of magnitude or more.” https://www.anthropic.com/research/designing-efficient-quantum-circuits
  2. 2.Same post. “Compared with the smallest previous design, one circuit in the family uses 12% more qubits but 17x fewer gates.” On one problem the post says Claude worked for 53 hours with minimal human input. The collaborators named on the post include Andi Gu, Alek Kemeny, and Harvard’s Susanne Yelin and Mikhail Lukin, and QuEra is also named. This desk did not copy an arXiv URL.

What is still unknown or disputed

Primary sources

Every claim in this story is drawn from the documents below. If a fetch failed, that is recorded on the card.

  1. Source 1

    Designing more efficient quantum circuits with Claude

    Anthropic · October 16, 2026

    Working largely on its own, Claude found designs that improve on the best published circuits, in some cases by an order of magnitude or more. Compared with the smallest previous design, one circuit in the family uses 12% more qubits but 17x fewer gates.

    https://www.anthropic.com/research/designing-efficient-quantum-circuits