Anthropic has introduced the Model Hardware Standard, a technical specification designed to let its Claude AI read and operate physical machinery — robots, laboratory instruments, manufacturing equipment — by encoding hardware constraints directly into a machine-readable format. Released as a research preview in late August 2026, the standard addresses a quiet but persistent bottleneck in industrial AI: the gap between what a machine can do and what an AI system actually knows about it. In making hardware knowledge portable and standardized, Anthropic is building a bridge between the reasoning