Claude designed three working gadgets with no circuit fixes

Anthropic asked its AI model Claude to design three electronic gadgets, and the prototypes worked without any fixes to their circuitry. The devices were a speakerphone, a voice-assistant hub and a handheld virtual pet. Anthropic says Claude can now design and prototype electronic hardware from start to finish, though these are still early builds.

What Claude did

Each project began with a short prompt. For the speakerphone, it asked for a puck that plugs into a computer over USB-C and includes microphones and a speaker, with Bluetooth. Claude then wrote the specifications and drew the wiring diagrams. It placed parts on a printed circuit board, routed the copper connections between them, designed a 3D-printable case, wrote the firmware and prepared a parts list. Firmware is the built-in software that runs a device.

Diode Computers, a company that designs and manufactures circuit boards, assembled the boards and ran the firmware under Claude's direction. Human engineers built the prototypes.

What got better

The biggest gain was in spatial reasoning: where parts go on a board and how to connect them. Earlier models put supporting parts too far from the chips they served and turned connectors the wrong way. The newer model, Claude Fable 5.2, made more compact layouts and routed the most sensitive connections first. Two benchmark scores show the gap:

• PCB Gym, an internal board-layout test: 69% for Fable 5.2, up from 25% for Fable 5.
• BenchCAD 2.1, a public test of rebuilding 3D parts and boards from drawings: 83.5%, nearly double Fable 5.1.

Fixing its own mistakes

Earlier models rarely revised their work. Over the past year, Diode built many boards with them that were 95% complete but still unusable. This time, Claude changed course on its own. While working on the voice-assistant hub, it noted the connections were "getting too tangled to trace visually" and decided to "rip these traces and start fresh." It deleted and rerouted connections dozens of times until the layout worked.

On the speakerphone board, it reassigned signals to different pins on two chips so the wiring stayed clean. Claude also checked manufacturers' datasheets when a design choice depended on a specific part.

What is not known yet

The speakerphone still works after weeks of use, and the other two devices are in good working order. But they are early prototypes. Anthropic says it does not yet know how they will hold up over longer use, or whether they would pass commercial certifications. Those are the checks a product usually needs before it can be sold.

If the approach holds up, building a custom device could get cheaper and faster for small businesses. That is a possibility, not a result yet.