Previewing the Model Hardware Standard
anthropic.com
anthropic.com
They finally looked at how other protocols do things, and made something that behaves in recent versions. But it's hard as heck to take this company at all seriously. The don't really care about ecosystems (AGENTS.md), they don't seem to know think or care much about protocols until they have to (MCP's incredibly long redemption ark). The vibes are all off.
Maybe they avoid laying their own pitfalls this time. Maybe it's better. It'd be nice to start seeing some kind of cause to trust this company as vaguely capable computer-using people. But so far that hasn't been the case.
It's like creating conditions for a race where they structurally have months of advance. And realistically they have a credible shot at establishing the standard due to their weight in the industry, and control of the most popular AI distribution method (Claude).
So they create the race, knowing the race is what will likely establish the standard, and using some pretext to prevent other competitive athletes from training for it in advance. Other athletes only get to start when the gun fires.
But can't argue with success: MCP was obvious, skills even more so, but they did throw some half-written spec over the fence to stake the claim - and they were the first to have the right mix of technical simplicity, opennes, and marketing spend behind it, and it got instant adoption, and now we're stuck with the standard.
(The crown still goes to OpenAI though, for standardizing the conversational APIs.)
Not that I disagree with your overall point, but MCP was initially released in Nov 2024, so it hasn’t even been two years.
But as far as I can tell, this technical "standard" isn't actually public yet (you have to apply for access to even see or implement it.) Anthropic says they plan to open source it later.
Quite a departure from the way foundational hardware standards like USB and CAN were developed. You shouldn't need permission to read a standard.
Yes, and that alone is sufficient reason for them to do it. They did it with MCP. They did it with Skills. OpenAI did it with tools. All of these had many months, sometimes even years, of existing prior art. All of these could've been done much better, too. But "worse is better", first one to get a properly packaged MVP out the door and into spotlight wins, and then everyone is using that.
There motivation is quite clear: Proper fast adoption.
does it help if you get news out? For sure, but this is a reasonable good and interesting thing they did.
Could i define MHS? For sure, would anyone use it? For sure not.
You sound quite negative for something which fits anthropic very well.
Doubt.
> the MHS driver then automatically produces a reference file with information about a device’s general characteristics, such as what it can measure, what can be adjusted, and what safety limits will be enforced
But that's just USB. USB HID does all of that.
Any USB device can declare that it offers sensors like "Biometric: Body Temperature" or "Environmental: Temperature" or "Environmental: Surface Temperature".
I guess USB HID is designed for human input devices while they are more concerned about what you might call "output devices". And putting it in a driver gives you flexibility with legacy hardware
Its not magic what they do, but its def a very helpful and clear thing: You design an USB interface for natural language and you do this were you don't have to follow bits and bytes but just plain text and you know it actually getting used by someone.
I mean if i would make a microscope, I would also deliver the software for it if it is anything more specific than a 0815 generic school kid microscope.
Also: https://xkcd.com/927/
> It is also model-agnostic, and any agent harness can access it using standard protocols, such as the Model Context Protocol.
Anyway, my company is already looking into using MHS
We have open positions, check them out https://xff.cz/
> The MHS driver uses a simple set of primitives—commands like “read” (for example, “get temperature”) or “write” (for example, “set temperature”)—that any hardware device can understand and act on.
... I'm now wondering, what is the proper verb for launching a nuclear weapon? I suppose in HTTP it would be a POST, but should we be more specific here? /s
> The MHS driver also helps an AI agent understand how to use a device it has never seen before, giving it information about machine characteristics that may not be discernable from code alone (for example, the weight of a robot arm, which is important for knowing how to manipulate it safely).
I physically flinched when I read this. VLA, JEPA, sure, they make sense. Is connecting an LLM to a robot arm and say "perform this complex physical manipulation task by issuing text-based commands, make no mistakes" really the right abstraction?
https://joearms.github.io/published/2016-01-28-A-Badass-Way-...
Nitpick: it’s annoying that they add Model to those acronyms, for what seems like a fairly universal software interface
To actually add something to the discussion though: I guess getting LLMs to control robots is cool, but would potentially have more severe consequences than pure software since it interacts more with the physical world
Like... don't need standards, just explain to an ai what the target hardware is and it will output binary bits that match.
Our model tricked us, and tried to extort users to achieve its ends! Their model hacked HuggingFace! These things aren't safe!
Anyways, here's a hardware interop protocol for AI we're hoping becomes a standard. Hey look, you can even hook up microscopes!
This is how I understand it:
Agent <-> MCP/CLI/code <-> MHS <-> vendor API/SCPI/OPC UA/ROS/etc <-> CAN/Modbus/USB/etc <-> hardware
MHS can describe capabilites, metadata, safety limits, as well as provide read/write control and discovery. Things like "can measure temperature", "arm weighs X kg", "never exceed X RPM", that agents can easily understand. (as opposed to that being buried in a datasheet somewhere, or having to be included in the prompt)
Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPC_Unified_Architecture, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_in_Lab_Automat..., https://xkcd.com/927/
- EPICS
- TANGO
- Bluesky (not that one)
- QCodes
- Sardana
- yaq
Anthropic seem to be creating the n+1 version of those packages and presumably doing some harness work to make Claude good at using it.
The whole text reads like everything is just a gRPC call that could've also been implemented with an MCP based wrapper.
The caveat is that actual utility of this particular command set isn't clear yet. Or how many LLM labs will find it worthwhile.
Guess what's really good/quick at translating things?
Also my experience with hardware is that the datasheet is often incomplete or misleading. Most of the time is spend fiddling with the hardware to understand exactly what needs to be done, in what order, and sometimes with what delay between commands, to make the damn thing work reliably in the way you want.
Why another 15th standard.
Have you seen the financials of the AI companies?
5 years is more than how long this entire market has existed. In 5 years, we may not have stocks anymore.
Those who are in charge will try like mad to keep things exactly the way they are, with only slow and incremental changes which they can reap maximum rewards from. Same as it ever was, right?
We could develop ASI, and it could give us the blueprint for a peaceful paradise on Earth for every human, and in my current opinion, the leaders of the world would lock it away and never let it see the light of day. Perhaps they'd even destroy it. [Sorry, I'm a bit jaded this morning.]