Anthropic Says Claude Designed Three Working Electronic Devices With Little Human Help

The company ran the tests with Diode Computers, which designs and manufactures circuit boards and with which Anthropic said it has a commercial relationship and has worked on board design since 2025. Diode assembled the boards and ran the firmware under the model's direction, because Claude was not connected to test equipment or to the machines that build and assemble boards. According to Anthropic's research post, all three prototypes worked and Diode said none needed fixes to its circuitry.

The result matters because hardware design has resisted automation far more than software. Anthropic said that about a year ago its models could manage narrow tasks such as reading a chip datasheet to work out which supporting parts it needed, but could not reliably lay out a board. Earlier models often produced layouts that were about 95% complete but unusable, it said, because they did not go back and undo placement choices that blocked routing. If a model can carry a design through to a board a factory can build without rounds of changes, it shortens one of the slowest loops in product development.

The three devices were a puck-shaped USB speakerphone with microphones, a speaker, a touch wheel and Bluetooth through an antenna printed on the board; a home voice-assistant hub with USB and Ethernet connections in a wedge-shaped case; and a battery-powered handheld virtual pet. The speakerphone and hub each use four-layer boards. Diode's prompting was limited to short instructions such as "continue" and "clean up the schematic", Anthropic said.

The post describes the model revising its own work without being asked. On the hub it deleted and rerouted tracks dozens of times, and it routed the paired USB and Ethernet signals with matched lengths. When the built-in router in KiCad, the open-source design tool, proved too slow because it placed one track at a time, Claude wrote its own grid-based router in roughly half an hour, which could lay each long track in about a second.

Some fixes went beyond the circuit. Claude calculated that a 25 mm microphone port on the hub would resonate near 3.4 kHz, inside the range of the human voice, and changed the case shape to shorten the port to about 10 mm, moving the resonance to about 8.9 kHz. On the speakerphone it reassigned pins on two chips to keep the touch-wheel tracks on one layer, and wrote firmware that dims the LED ring as audio gets louder so the device stays under its designed current limit.

Anthropic also published benchmark scores. On PCB Gym, an internal Diode test of component placement and rerouting, Fable 5.2 scored 69% against 25% for Fable 5. On BenchCAD 2.1, a public benchmark for rebuilding 3D parts and boards from drawings, it scored 83.5%, close to double the result of Fable 5.1. Diode said it built all three boards from Claude's files without the back-and-forth that factories usually need.

The company was explicit about the limits. The devices are early prototypes that have not been through electrical validation, antenna tuning, thermal testing or certification, and they were not designed for mass production. The post gives no figures for total cost or build time and does not compare the work with that of human engineers. Anthropic noted that other labs are pursuing similar work, citing an OpenAI effort to design a handheld device.

The research arrives on the same day Anthropic released Fable 5.2 to all customers. The company said its next step is to test whether Claude can design denser, faster and more complex boards, check designs in simulation, and learn from measurements taken on finished devices.