Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, during an interview at Anthropic headquarters in San Francisco, California, USA, on Thursday, April 30, 2026.
Jason Henry | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Anthropic on Thursday announced a new interface that will make it easier to operate AI agents and communicate with machines as the artificial intelligence giant expands into the physical world.
Anthropic said the Model Hardware Standard (MHS) is designed to work with any device with a programmable interface, such as those used in scientific research or advanced manufacturing. Users can think of it like a USB-C code that standardizes the way information is sent between devices.
“We built this for science, to show the promise of AI, but there are also huge benefits for businesses and industry,” Elizabeth Kelly, Anthropic’s director of beneficial deployments, said in an interview with CNBC.
The announcement signals Anthropic’s move deeper into the hardware space, where rivals like OpenAI and Amazon have spent billions of dollars designing AI-native devices and manufacturing tools. Anthropic is building a silicon team to design custom chips for its models and recently hired Caitlin Kalinowski, a hardware executive who previously worked at OpenAI. Meta and appleaccording to LinkedIn.
Anthropic said MHS aims to help companies reduce the time it takes to set up and integrate hardware. It is also model independent, meaning users are independent of Anthropic’s Claude model family.
Anthropic said MHS will initially be available to select organizations in the science, robotics and manufacturing fields as part of a research preview. However, the company plans to eventually open source the standard, meaning any device manufacturer in any industry can adopt it.
Anthropic open-sourced another popular standard in 2024 called the Model Context Protocol, which facilitates connections between AI agents and data sources.
WATCH: Watch CNBC’s full interview with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.
