Claude Mythos 5 cuts elliptic-curve circuit gates 17x with 12% more qubits

Claude Mythos 5 produced quantum circuits that beat the best published designs on seven of eight tested tasks. The work covered chemistry, numerical computation, optimization, quantum simulation, and number theory, so this was not a single narrow benchmark.

• Elliptic-curve point addition: 17x fewer gates than the prior design
• Resource tradeoff: 12% more qubits

The striking part is the search process. Anthropic used OpenEvolve to generate circuit proposals, test correctness and resource costs, then evolve the strongest architectures. The 17x reduction is not a free win because extra qubits still matter, but the result points to algorithm design improving through automated search rather than hardware changes alone. Anthropic reported the seven-of-eight result on October 16, 2026.