Anthropic has released its Model Hardware Standard (MHS) as a research preview, marking the company's first foray into so-called physical AI — the emerging field of AI systems that can perceive and act in the physical world. The framework, launched Thursday, connects advanced large language models (LLMs) such as Anthropic's Claude with physical objects, from manufacturing equipment to laboratory microscopes.

The vision behind MHS is a factory where robotic arms and assembly lines "communicate" in their own shared language, or a science lab where microscopes autonomously search for a certain type of molecule at all hours of the day, with no humans necessary.

With MHS, companies can integrate AI into their equipment in "hours or minutes," Anthropic said. Typically, the process takes "weeks, if not months" and requires specialists to perform a custom build. Expanded access to advanced AI tools will pave the way for "autonomous, round-the-clock experiments and workflows," the company said, with scientific research and advanced manufacturing among the primary uses.

MHS can also connect multiple devices to one another, enabling them to communicate through a set of commands such as "read." Any hardware device can understand these commands and act on them.

The standard is model-agnostic, meaning it works with any LLM—not just Claude—including models built by other companies such as OpenAI or open-source models. It is built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a universal, open standard for connecting data sources that Anthropic debuted in 2024. The MCP is "kind of like the USB for AI to software connection," Alek Kemeny, a member of the technical staff at Anthropic, told Fortune. Since Anthropic open-sourced MCP, competitors including OpenAI and Google have moved to support it as well, so MHS rests on a foundation that much of the AI industry has already adopted.

Not all existing equipment can connect to MHS out of the box, as not all devices have a programming interface, Kemeny noted. As part of the project, Anthropic is working with "a lot of device manufacturers" to build new products with the necessary interface, which come pre-loaded with MHS. The company is also helping manufacturers add MHS connections to existing products. How quickly that hardware reaches labs and factory floors will shape how soon researchers and manufacturers can shift from bespoke integrations to the kind of plug-and-play setup Anthropic envisions.

"That's the future we imagine and are moving into," Kemeny said. "In the future, scientists can buy these devices and out of the box it works. That's just the process of adopting a standard."

Jonah Cool, head of partnerships and deployment of science at Anthropic, added that scientific equipment often "suffers from proprietary solutions that are very brittle and often don't meet the need of scientists." MHS provides a standardized, easily programmable interface designed to help scientists connect any model to their equipment. "We want to avoid vendor lock-in for scientists," Cool said.

The MHS research preview arrives amid growing interest in the potential of combining AI and robotics. Hugging Face also debuted its first physical AI product on Thursday, a robotic duck, although it is not powered by MHS, Anthropic said. Nvidia, which is set to purchase Hugging Face for $13 billion, has also long championed physical AI. In March, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicted that in the future "every industrial company will become a robotics company." Google DeepMind has likewise introduced its own Gemini Robotics models for machines, an indication of how quickly hardware-ready AI is becoming a competitive arena.

Anthropic developed MHS in partnership with the HHMI Janelia Research Campus, a biomedical research center in Virginia. A "handful" of labs and hardware manufacturers received early access during development, in fields such as biotech, robotics, and quantum computing. Partners include Genentech, Carnegie Mellon University, quantum computing company QuEra, Universal Robots, Amazon Web Services, Doosan Robotics, Danaher, and Hugging Face.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.