Anthropic has Claude Fable 5.2 design three working electronic devices from short prompts

Anthropic says it asked Claude Fable 5.2 to design a USB speakerphone, a voice-assistant hub and a battery-powered handheld virtual pet from short prompts, working with Diode Computers, a circuit-board maker with which Anthropic has a commercial relationship. Claude wrote the specifications, schematics, board layouts, copper routing, 3D-printable enclosures, firmware and parts lists. Diode manufactured the boards directly from Claude's design files and built the prototypes, which Anthropic says worked without circuit fixes and, for the speakerphone, still work after weeks of use.

What changed from earlier models. Anthropic says Fable 5.2 reasoned much better about geometry, such as where to place components and how to route high-speed and noise-sensitive connections first, and that it revised its own work unprompted, in one case deleting and rerouting copper connections dozens of times. It also wrote its own grid-based router for the hub, which Anthropic says could lay a long track in about a second, and ran manufacturing and parts-stock checks itself.

Benchmarks. Diode's internal PCB Gym benchmark scores Fable 5.2 at 69%, against 25% for Fable 5. On the public BenchCAD 2.1 it scores 83.5%, nearly double Fable 5.1.

Limits. The devices are prototypes: they have not been through electrical validation, antenna tuning, thermal testing or certification, and were not designed for mass production. Claude was not connected to test equipment or factory machines, so Diode's engineers built and tested them by hand.