Claude designs quantum circuits that beat the best published versions

Anthropic says its Claude model has designed quantum circuits that use fewer qubits and fewer gates than the best previously published designs. The company described the work on October 16, 2026. It was led by Andi Gu through Anthropic's STEM Fellows Program, with Harvard researchers Susanne Yelin and Mikhail Lukin, and a full paper is on arXiv.

The team gave Claude plain-language descriptions of eight basic routines used by larger quantum algorithms in chemistry, optimisation, physics simulation and number theory. An automated checker tested each proposed circuit for correctness and scored it by qubits times gates, and Claude used that feedback to try again with little human input.

Two results stand out. For point addition on elliptic curves, a standard benchmark, Claude spent 53 hours and found a new way to do modular inversion without storing a long history of earlier steps, then checked the maths with formal proofs in Lean. One resulting design uses 12 percent more qubits than the smallest earlier design but 17 times fewer gates. For decoded quantum interferometry, a promising optimisation method, Claude cut the gate count of its most expensive step by about 12 times compared with Google's earlier design. Anthropic notes Claude tended to be overly cautious and needed nudges to try bolder ideas.

Why it matters

If AI can shrink the hardware that useful quantum programs need, practical quantum computing could arrive sooner than expected.

Source: Anthropic