Anthropic publishes Vibe physics AI grad student research

Anthropic has published a guest post by Harvard University physics professor Matthew Schwartz on its Science Features platform. The post describes an experiment in which Schwartz supervised the company's AI model Claude through an entire theoretical physics research calculation without ever editing files himself. Schwartz holds the position of principal investigator in the NSF Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions. The project was structured at the level of a second-year graduate student, or G2, at his institution. Such projects feature well-defined goals and established methods that allow for verification at each step. Schwartz selected the resummation of the Sudakov shoulder in the C-parameter for electron-positron collisions because the physics framework is understood and he could check the work. To guide the process, Schwartz first asked Claude along with GPT 5.2 and Gemini 3.0 to generate plans for the research. The models then merged the strongest elements from each plan into a single outline. That outline contained 102 separate tasks organized across seven stages. Schwartz provided the merged plan to Claude and had it break the outline into detailed subsections. He subsequently used the Claude Code extension in VS Code to direct the model through each task one at a time. Results from each task were written to individual markdown files.