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  • It’s actually really cool, and not just for AI. That should make it easy to automate some processes with simple scripts.

    Nitpick: it’s annoying that they add Model to those acronyms, for what seems like a fairly universal software interface

    by dgellow
  • Open Sound Control reinvented?

    https://joearms.github.io/published/2016-01-28-A-Badass-Way-...

    by sriku
  • Noting that qDot already figured all this out, along with a discovery layer. The spec has not been publicly released, can anybody verify if MHS wraps buttplug.io like MCP wraps JSON-RPC?
    by neomantra
  • How does this compare to ROS 2? Roughly the same goals.
    by Animats
  • Simple task-specific CLI tools that your agent builds for itself are usually lower-friction than yet another Universal Thing Doer standard. As a bonus, human operators also benefit.

    > The MHS driver also helps an AI agent understand how to use a device it has never seen before, giving it information about machine characteristics that may not be discernable from code alone (for example, the weight of a robot arm, which is important for knowing how to manipulate it safely).

    I physically flinched when I read this. VLA, JEPA, sure, they make sense. Is connecting an LLM to a robot arm and say "perform this complex physical manipulation task by issuing text-based commands, make no mistakes" really the right abstraction?

    by wren6991
  • Concur. Have we forgotten about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25?
    by EQYV
  • So something like what happened with Cyberdyne Systems. So, by the time AI becomes self-conscious, it will already have the physical capabilities to control manufacturing and replication. Good times. Terminator arriving any time now from the future. :)

    Anyway, my company is already looking into using MHS

    We have open positions, check them out https://xff.cz/

    by megous
  • Thinking about the primitive command verbs that they mention:

    > The MHS driver uses a simple set of primitives—commands like “read” (for example, “get temperature”) or “write” (for example, “set temperature”)—that any hardware device can understand and act on.

    ... I'm now wondering, what is the proper verb for launching a nuclear weapon? I suppose in HTTP it would be a POST, but should we be more specific here? /s

    by falcor84
  • How is this different from tool calls? Or rather, MCP?
    by shay_ker
  • It's likely just tool calls, so it might ride over MCP:

    > It is also model-agnostic, and any agent harness can access it using standard protocols, such as the Model Context Protocol.

    by yencabulator
  • Sounds like PyLabRobot:

    https://docs.pylabrobot.org/stable/

    by automationwiz
  • As far as I can tell is these standards (MCP/MHS/etc) are just semi obvious tool inferfaces that Anthropic uses as training scenarios.
    by mips_avatar
  • > The MHS driver uses a simple set of primitives—commands like “read” (for example, “get temperature”) or “write” (for example, “set temperature”)—that any hardware device can understand and act on. And it makes each device discoverable in a standard format, so that devices and agents can find each other and communicate across networks without needing a bespoke “translator” program in between.

    > the MHS driver then automatically produces a reference file with information about a device’s general characteristics, such as what it can measure, what can be adjusted, and what safety limits will be enforced

    But that's just USB. USB HID does all of that.

    Any USB device can declare that it offers sensors like "Biometric: Body Temperature" or "Environmental: Temperature" or "Environmental: Surface Temperature".

    I guess USB HID is designed for human input devices while they are more concerned about what you might call "output devices". And putting it in a driver gives you flexibility with legacy hardware

    by wongarsu
  • Anthropic is gearing up for an IPO. The fact that other protocols already do what MHS describes is not relevant to the intended audience: investors with FOMO.

    Also: https://xkcd.com/927/

    by mechanicalpulse
  • Its more like that no one took the time and effort to standardize a proper USB HID interface in a way that that it has clear benefit of a hardware manufactuerer exponsing a good generic easy to use interface through USB HID and standardizing reasonable broad spectrum of features.

    Its not magic what they do, but its def a very helpful and clear thing: You design an USB interface for natural language and you do this were you don't have to follow bits and bytes but just plain text and you know it actually getting used by someone.

    I mean if i would make a microscope, I would also deliver the software for it if it is anything more specific than a 0815 generic school kid microscope.

    by Ahrgo
  • The standard makes sense: models work much better when devices expose standardized, machine-readable interfaces.

    But as far as I can tell, this technical "standard" isn't actually public yet (you have to apply for access to even see or implement it.) Anthropic says they plan to open source it later.

    Quite a departure from the way foundational hardware standards like USB and CAN were developed. You shouldn't need permission to read a standard.

    by sinab
  • >Anthropic says they plan to open source

    Doubt.

    by optimalsolver
  • They probably want to iterate on it with close partners before making it public
    by dyzone
  • USB was developed by a big alliance of major software and hardware vendors. This stuff on the other hand always feels like Anthropic is just scared of dropping out of the news cycle because other companies are constantly releasing models or making them cheaper, while they currently have nothing real to offer themselves. MCP was a complete clusterfuck an announced at a time when OpenAI absolutely dominated with reasoning models while Anthropic's first reasoning model was still months off. The only reason it took off is because noone else bothered to make something better and managers loved it so much that everyone else got dragged on board because of demand.
    by sigmoid10
  • MCP was a bucket of Not Invented Here nonsense, that ignored years of protocol design. It was incredibly jank and hard to run at any scale, for years and years.

    They finally looked at how other protocols do things, and made something that behaves in recent versions. But it's hard as heck to take this company at all seriously. The don't really care about ecosystems (AGENTS.md), they don't seem to know think or care much about protocols until they have to (MCP's incredibly long redemption ark). The vibes are all off.

    Maybe they avoid laying their own pitfalls this time. Maybe it's better. It'd be nice to start seeing some kind of cause to trust this company as vaguely capable computer-using people. But so far that hasn't been the case.

    by jauntywundrkind
  • It's a bit of both for Anthropic I think, sometimes cutting edge and quite interesting or just good improvements, sometimes ignoring best practices either recently established or known for decades. Obvious to see where the smart people are in high places at the company.
    by DetroitThrow
  • MCP was a bucket of Not Invented Here nonsense, that ignored years of protocol design. It was incredibly jank and hard to run at any scale, for years and years.

    Not that I disagree with your overall point, but MCP was initially released in Nov 2024, so it hasn’t even been two years.

    by senordevnyc
  • I think I agree. I find it a little bit annoying that they do not start by a survey of the existing landscape, discuss the issues and what works well, and spend the effort to show that they can indeed to be trusted as the authority behind such a protocol expected to become standard. For MCP, it started very messy, but from what I understand it was developed by a small team within the company working on internal tooling, for their own use case, I think it’s reasonable to expect something a bit awkward, I don’t think they expected its success
    by dgellow
  • It's literally the "Worse is Better" approach at play here. Yes, same one that OSS and the industry love so much, the same received wisdom that gave us Unix and C, and 40 years of them catching up to what Lisp Machines to do. Talk about a redemption arc.

    But can't argue with success: MCP was obvious, skills even more so, but they did throw some half-written spec over the fence to stake the claim - and they were the first to have the right mix of technical simplicity, opennes, and marketing spend behind it, and it got instant adoption, and now we're stuck with the standard.

    (The crown still goes to OpenAI though, for standardizing the conversational APIs.)

    by TeMPOraL
  • I think they're doing this so they can have months of advanced notice of how the protocol will look, to post-train their models to be the only ones with the ability to interact with this protocol on the day it becomes public.

    It's like creating conditions for a race where they structurally have months of advance. And realistically they have a credible shot at establishing the standard due to their weight in the industry, and control of the most popular AI distribution method (Claude).

    So they create the race, knowing the race is what will likely establish the standard, and using some pretext to prevent other competitive athletes from training for it in advance. Other athletes only get to start when the gun fires.

    by AYBABTME