Anthropic guest post: “Claude-shaped” problems and the BootLoops toolkit for quantitative science
Anthropic’s research site published “Claude-shaped science,” a guest post by physicist Prof. Matthew Schwartz: instead of forcing models to work like human scientists, he seeks “Claude-shaped” problems suited to current LLMs and built BootLoops, an open-source toolkit for checkable quantitative calculations. The piece lists cross-field cases in ecology, population genetics, and economics replication packages, while stressing expert steering and human verification.
Anthropic published the guest post “Claude-shaped science.” Author Matthew Schwartz argues current LLMs are “good at science, but they are not scientists,” creating an impedance mismatch with human research practice. He instead sought problems matching model strengths (breadth, coding, math/stats, fast literature parsing) and iterated an open-source toolkit, BootLoops—an LLM harness usable with any model, especially suited to a class of quantitative calculations. He contrasts an earlier “Vibe Physics” trial where Claude acted like a strong graduate student but needed sentence-by-sentence correction, versus later “collaborating as it actually is.”
On semi-numerical S-matrix bootstrap work for scattering amplitudes, he says Claude (citing Fable 5) reproduced his paper’s results in about 20 minutes versus weeks of his own code, then generalized to elliptic integrals, ending with 30 end-to-end BootLooped integrals—15 reproductions and 15 claimed newly computed. The model mapped similar integrals onto population-genetics Bayesian evidence and finite-field methods in evolutionary biology; he then recruited domain experts to filter results that were technically correct but scientifically dull. Examples include ecology work claiming Barro Colorado Island tree-species mix changes 4.5× faster than neutral theory allows, population-genetics analysis of 5.7 billion nearby mutation pairs from the 1000 Genomes Project claiming gene-conversion evidence, and an AI data editor porting replication packages for 4,452 papers across five journals. Those scientific claims are the author’s account; many manuscripts are still being extended and checked; arXiv/dataset citations in unread_references were not read this batch.
He also lists failure modes: premature victory declarations, untrustworthy qualitative “good agreement,” wrong conclusions, the need for human taste, and endless grinding. He says 36 manuscripts across 18 fields with 19 coauthors arose in three months from ~400 candidate problems, coordinated via many sessions on cloud VMs. The close stresses that AI can speed checkable calculation and fill science’s “convex hull,” but one prompt does not replace the scientific method. BootLoops details are at bootloops.ai with the harness on GitHub. A Claude Science product page was read in verification, but this item’s core event is the methods guest post; the product page is not used to invent unverified product capabilities.
Sources
- Claude-shaped science — www.anthropic.com