Holy shit! This might be one of the most underrated releases of the year. Anthropic just gave Claude the ability to control physical lab equipment like microscopes, robotic arms, liquid handlers, lasers. The results are wild: – QuEra had Claude fix quantum computer lasers overnight, unsupervised. A fix that took human experts 5-10 minutes, Claude got down to 6 seconds. Success rate: 58% → 99.3%. – Genentech had Claude self-optimize lab pipetting by scoring its own results against expert baselines, and converged on the right settings on its own. – A university lab went from manual 4 am plate-swapping to Claude Code running the whole workflow hands-free. – Claude even ran qPCR experiments that helped detect human sewage contamination in a California creek. Automated science labs are closer than most people think. Anthropic is somewhat back!