Claude Opus 5.5 agents propose two candidate magnets for future computer memory

Vals AI, a company that measures and compares AI models, published two candidate materials for next-generation computer memory on its blog on Sunday. They were found by a team of Claude Opus 5.5 agents (the Anthropic model) working with Geby Jaff, who wrote the post.

The goal was a type of magnet called "Luttinger compensated": it has zero net magnetism, like an antiferromagnet, but it sorts electrons by spin (the property used by hard drive read heads and MRAM memory), like a fridge magnet. According to their calculations, both are semiconductors and that spin sorting is far larger than thermal jiggling at room temperature.

The first, YBaMnFeO5, is a new compound designed by the agents, although the post warns that it will likely be hard to make in its useful form. The second, KV[Cr(CN)6], from the same family as the Prussian blue pigment, was first made in 1999 and at the time stayed magnetically ordered up to 376 K (103 °C). According to Vals AI, as far as they found, nobody had pointed out before that it belongs to this type of magnet.

These are predictions: neither the band gap nor the spin sorting has been measured yet, and the next step, they say, is to make KV[Cr(CN)6] again and measure it. They have published the calculations, the code and a list of known caveats on GitHub.