Anthropic publishes the Model Hardware Standard, a read/write driver spec letting agents drive lab instruments over MCP

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Announced 27 August, the Model Hardware Standard is a shared specification for AI agents to operate physical devices, reducing the weeks-to-months of bespoke integration work per instrument to hours. Drivers expose two primitives, read and write, alongside automatic device discovery, natural-language metadata tags, and three control surfaces: MCP, a CLI, and code APIs, with a model-agnostic design. Partner results are concrete rather than aspirational: Carnegie Mellon integrated dose-response curves in 8 hours against a typical several weeks, QuEra took laser relock from 58% to 99.3% success and 150 seconds to 6 seconds per attempt, and Tetsuwan Scientific measured 9,143 dispenses across 300 transfer types.