Anthropic published STEM Fellows research on Oct 16: given plain-language specs plus an automated evaluator that verifies correctness and scores qubits x gates, Claude Mythos 5 found quantum-circuit designs that beat the best published ones across eight primitives in chemistry, optimization, simulation and number theory. On elliptic-curve point addition it worked 53 hours with minimal human input and produced the first reversible divsteps modular inversion with no stored branch history; for decoded quantum interferometry it cut Reed-Solomon decoder gates about 12x versus Google's prior construction. Paper: arXiv 2610.22367.
Key Takeaways
- ✓Beat the best published designs on all 8 quantum-circuit primitives; the paper says 7 of 8 cut both Toffoli and qubit counts (arXiv 2610.22367)
- ✓Point addition: 53 hours of largely autonomous work yielded the first reversible divsteps modular inversion with no stored branch history, formalized in Lean
- ✓One design in the new family uses 12% more qubits but 17x fewer gates than the smallest previous design
- ✓DQI Reed-Solomon decoder: ~12x fewer gates than Google's prior construction; 403M sampled decodings shrank a 665-qubit worst-case reserve to 19 qubits (~1-in-10,000 failure)
- ✓Reusable pattern: LLM writes Python circuits, an independent evaluator verifies and scores qubits x gates, and the loop runs without human input between rounds
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Anthropic's STEM Fellows team (led by Andi Gu, with Harvard's Susanne Yelin and Mikhail Lukin) gave Claude Mythos 5 plain-language specs for eight quantum-circuit primitives plus an automated evaluator that checks correctness and scores qubits x gates. Working in a closed loop with no human input between rounds, Claude beat the best published designs on all eight; the arXiv paper (2610.22367) reports that seven cut both Toffoli and qubit counts. On elliptic-curve point addition, Claude worked 53 hours, proved new algebraic identities and produced the first reversible divsteps modular inversion that stores no branch history, verified in Lean; one design uses 12% more qubits but 17x fewer gates than the smallest prior design. For decoded quantum interferometry, switching to Berlekamp-Massey and reconstructing temporaries cut the Reed-Solomon decoder's gates ~12x versus Google's construction, using 403M sampled decodings to shrink a 665-qubit worst-case reserve to 19 qubits. All figures are Anthropic-reported. The takeaway for developers is the evaluator-guided loop: any problem with machine-checkable outputs and a scalar objective can be handed to a coding agent for long autonomous optimization.
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