Claude completes 9 rounds of frontier physics calculations, experts originally thought direct computation was too difficult.

动察 Beating AI News Flash: Anthropic disclosed that Claude Fable 5 completed a nine-loop theoretical particle physics calculation in Claude Science, solving the six-particle scattering amplitude in planar N=4 super Yang-Mills theory. Scattering amplitudes are used to calculate the probability of particles interacting. The higher the "loop count," the more corrections are included, and the harder the calculation becomes. This particular problem had previously been publicly solved to eight loops.

This time, humans were not involved hand-by-hand. Two physicists at Anthropic first told Claude what to calculate, and then mainly let it continue working, reporting progress every 4 to 6 hours. Claude ultimately calculated the result using two different routes. The direct route used Python and SymPy, running for a week on 96 CPUs, with a compute cost of about $100; including the cost of long-running Claude calls, a single complete route cost about $1,000 to $2,000.

The result was then independently verified by SLAC and Stanford physicist Lance Dixon, who participated in the previous eight-loop research. Dixon said he had originally thought the nine-loop amplitude would be very difficult to calculate directly. Claude also did not invent new physics methods; it mainly ran through, in full, the methods, constraints, and large amount of tedious calculation that researchers had established in the past.

At the same time, He Song's team at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, also independently advanced to nine loops with the assistance of GPT-6, and has already obtained the main part of the result.