Anthropic: Claude atteint neuf boucles en super-Yang-Mills N=4
TL;DR
- Claude used established bootstrap methods without inventing new physics; the barrier was compute mobilization and workflow engineering, not theoretical innovation.
- A Chinese Academy of Sciences team using GPT-6 independently reached the same nine-loop result, confirming reproducibility of the computation across AI platforms.
- Lance Dixon, whose eight-loop indirect record Claude surpassed, personally verified the result and called it a remarkable victory for LLM-driven science.
Le résultat, annoncé sur le blog d'Anthropic par l'ancien physicien théoricien Matt von Hippel: Claude a calculé l'amplitude à six particules (hexagone) en super-Yang-Mills N=4 planaire à neuf boucles, un cran au-dessus du précédent record de huit boucles, obtenu il y a quelques années par le groupe de Lance Dixon au SLAC.
« It's not often that you issue a challenge, only to see it beaten a month later », écrit von Hippel, qui avait lancé le défi en août sur son blog 4gravitons. Fin août, deux physiciens d'Anthropic, Liam Fitzpatrick et Siddharth Mishra-Sharma, l'ont contacté pour dire qu'ils l'avaient relevé.
Ils ont utilisé Fable 5.1 à l'intérieur de Claude Science, ce que von Hippel décrit comme un « harness », un programme qui encadre le LLM par des règles et des prompts structurés. Après avoir demandé au modèle quel problème il pensait pouvoir traiter, l'équipe lui a donné une consigne minimale, puis l'a laissé tourner en pilote automatique. Extrait d'un des prompts de relance: « I'm going to sleep and won't be available for another several hours. Keep working on this until I tell you to stop. Give me updates every 4-6 hours. »
Claude a mené le calcul par deux voies indépendantes: le bootstrap original, et l'approche indirecte par form factor. La partie bootstrap, en Python avec SymPy, a coûté environ 100 dollars, soit l'équivalent de « running 96 CPUs for a week ». Chaque approche complète représentait « one or two thousand dollars, mostly due to the expense of running Claude for so long ».
Quelques jours après l'annonce, le groupe de Song He, amplitudéologue à l'Académie chinoise des sciences à Pékin, a communiqué un résultat comparable, obtenu avec l'aide de GPT-6 mais « not the kind of one-shot almost human-less approach Anthropic used ». Lance Dixon, qui a validé la sortie en s'appuyant sur le form factor à neuf boucles que son équipe préparait déjà, résume: « it's quite a triumph, in my opinion, for a large language model to execute all of the steps in the complicated recipe we laid out. »
Von Hippel en tire une leçon plus large: « My biggest takeaway is that there is more low-hanging fruit out there than you'd expect. » Cela tranche avec le reste de notre chronique Anthropic des dernières semaines, davantage occupée par le bras de fer avec Washington autour de l'AISI et du « doomerism ».
Ce qu'en disent les autres médias
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4gravitons Lire →
Von Hippel's own reaction post, independent of the Anthropic-sponsored write-up; assesses what the result means for the field from the physicist who issued the challenge.
They paid $1,000 or so to make a significant next step in an ongoing research program in theoretical physics.
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36Kr Lire →
Best coverage of the concurrent CAS team and GPT-6 result; sources Lance Dixon directly; positions this as multi-team convergence, not a single-company achievement.
For a large language model to be able to execute every step of this complex recipe and organize computing power, it is a quite remarkable victory.
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Unite.AI Lire →
Sources von Hippel's assessment that the result reveals more low-hanging fruit in the field than experts expected; notes Claude used established methods, not novel techniques.
Claude Science accomplished the calculation in one shot, without any scientific oversight more sophisticated than repeated instructions to keep working
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AlphaSignal Lire →
Emphasizes cost-efficiency and LLM agent workflow execution as the real story; foregrounds independent SLAC verification by Lance Dixon.
Claude autonomously computed the six-particle amplitude in planar N=4 super Yang-Mills to nine loops
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Superpower Daily Lire →
Foregrounds the concurrent CAS team result and the known-methods-plus-more-compute framing that Anthropic's post downplays.
Claude applied known methods with more computing effort than researchers had tried, rather than finding a way around a fundamental limit.
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Crypto Briefing Lire →
Frames the result as a direct response to von Hippel's August 2026 public challenge; accessible framing for a general tech audience.
A largely unsupervised AI run costing a few thousand dollars beat a result that took human physicists years to reach
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Runtime Wire Lire →
Skeptical framing: questions whether loop count alone measures what was accomplished; notes prior nine-loop work exists in related subproblems.
The nine-loop figure is striking, but it does not stand on its own as a measure of what the model accomplished.
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It Does What Now? Lire →
Notes von Hippel was compensated by Anthropic while also writing the primary announcement; frames achievement as a one-loop extension of existing technique.
an extension of an established, well-defined calculation technique by one loop, not an open-ended discovery
Shared on Bluesky by 4 AI experts
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New on the Science Blog: Yes, Claude can do Nine Loops.
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Wow, I just found out that our team has been scooped by Anthropic www.anthropic.com/research/yes... See the addendum of the post “How does it feel to be scooped by a machine?” written by my collaborator Lance Dixon (wh…
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neat www.anthropic.com/research/yes...
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Article original publié par anthropic.com
Lire l'article original →Titre original : Claude Science calcule une amplitude à neuf boucles en super-Yang-Mills N=4, un record de précision