Can AI design circuit boards yet?

We got pretty excited yesterday when OpenAI put a demo of GPT-6 Astra working on a circuit board in KiCad on the front page of its launch post. It is cool to see electronics show up in a major model release like this. We are obviously still some distance from asking an AI to build an entire phone in one prompt. The demo does raise a question we have been thinking about for a while, though: how do we measure whether the electronics an AI produces are actually any good? The models know a surprising amount about electronics Our experience has been that current models know much more about electronics than their output in conventional design tools tends to show. They have read textbooks, datasheets, application notes and a lot of code. You can have an agent operate a graphical CAD tool, but it spends a lot of time clicking around and keeping track of what is on screen. A lot of its context consists of coordinates, menus and application state. EEBench uses atopile instead. The circuit lives in declarative code, so the agent can work directly on components, connections and electrical constraints. It can change the design, build it, run a simulation and inspect what failed without leaving the project. This has worked much better for us than asking a model to draw lines in a GUI. It also means the benchmark can spend less time testing computer use and more time testing electronics. .ELEC: @STD::Import { .project &= "electronics" .org &= "atopile" } .Submission: @type { .vin: ELEC::ElectricPower .vhold: ELEC::ElectricPower .vhold.lv ~ .vin.lv .c_bank: ELEC::Capacitor { .capacitance &= 22uF +/- 20% .max_voltage &= 10V..25V .temperature_coefficient &= "X5R" .package &= "0805" } .vhold.hv ~> .c_bank ~> .vhold.lv } The real world is messy One of the public tasks is based on a residential energy meter. When its 5 V supply disappears, the circuit has to keep the processor alive for another 20 ms so it can save the accumulated reading. The protected rail must stay above the processor's 3.0 V brownout threshold during that window. Most models intuitively jump to the right base conclusion: add a capacitor. A real capacitor makes the task more interesting. A ceramic part may provide much less than its advertised capacitance once it has voltage across it. Parts have tolerances. Adding more capacitance costs more, takes up space and makes the rail slower to recharge when the power returns. A design that works with nominal values can fail with the parts that arrive. EEBench cuts the input power in simulation and measures what happens. It checks the voltage throughout the outage, the effective capacitance at the operating point, the recovery after power returns and the limits on package, dielectric, voltage rating and cost. The meter is one of the easier tasks. In a harder analog task, the agent may have to synthesize a multiple-feedback low-pass filter around an op-amp, solve the resistor and capacitor ratios for the required poles, and keep its gain, cutoff frequency and Q inside their limits after every component is pushed to a worst-case tolerance corner. The harness rebuilds the SPICE deck for those corners, runs the AC and transient captures, binds measurements to named probes, and records each result against its lower and upper specification limits. But getting the equations right is only part of electronics engineering. EEBench uses real manufacturer parts, with specifications extracted from their datasheets and carried into the SPICE model. The agent has to find a combination that works across those tolerance corners while also choosing parts that exist, can be ordered and are reasonably priced for the product. That trade-off between electrical performance, cost and supply is much closer to designing real hardware than picking ideal values from a textbook. This is the part we find most interesting, because it is what electrical engineering eventually boils down to, just like every other engineering discipline: trade-offs. How the grading works EEBench checks are fully deterministic. It builds the submitted design, constructs the circuit graph and bill of materials, and runs a set of SPICE simulations and design checks. Each requirement produces a measurement with a limit. For the energy-meter task, the harness measures the protected rail while the input drops out and returns. Other tasks measure gain, thresholds, ripple, transient response and behavior at component-tolerance corners. The technical score is combined with cost efficiency against a reference bill of materials. Cost only helps once the circuit works. This is similar to giving a coding agent a compiler and tests, except the tests are measuring voltages and component behavior.. EEBench V1 covers analog and digital design through simulation. It does not yet tell us whether a model can lay out, manufacture and bring up a complete product. We want to add those parts later. The current benchmark concentrates on the requirements, design and verification loop because that is where we can already grade useful engineering work objectively. The full methodology and sample result explorer are public. What we are seeing on the leaderboard The September 1 results are encouraging. Claude Opus 5 scored 61.6% across the 13 tasks in EEBench V1. Grok 4.6 came second at 57.1%, just ahead of Claude Fable 5.1 at 56.4%. A few months ago we would not have expected models to do this well. There was another result we were especially happy to see: xAI included EEBench in the Grok 4.6 model card. It appears in the section on “engineering acceleration,” alongside evaluations for 3D modeling and parametric CAD. Their published run put Grok 4.6 at 60.0% with xhigh reasoning effort. Seeing a frontier lab use EEBench to describe a new model's engineering ability makes us think this is becoming a category people care about. Anthropic's models have consistently done well in this environment. Grok's rise is also interesting. In its Grok 4.6 launch post, xAI says the model received high-quality engineering data and RL training in domain-specific environments including computer-aided design. Its EEBench result fits that story. The OpenAI models we have tested so far sit further down the table. GPT-5.5 scored 42.3%, while GPT-5.6 Sol scored 39.4%. We do not have a GPT-6 Astra result yet. After seeing it work on a board in KiCad, we would really like to find out how it handles these circuit-design tasks. Training environment Once we had a simulation harness that could grade a circuit, we also had the beginnings of an RL environment for electronics. The same checks can be used as reward signals during post-training. A failed run contains useful information. We can see which voltage missed its limit, which operating corner failed, or whether the model solved the problem with an unnecessarily expensive design. That gives a training loop more to work with than a model saying that a schematic looks plausible. EEBench is the small, public view of this work. We are also starting to work directly with frontier labs that want to make their models better at electronics. If you work on evals or post-training, you can talk to us about the larger evaluation suites and simulation-backed training environments we provide. So, can it design a circuit board? For a useful and growing set of circuit problems, we think the answer is already yes. The scores also make it clear that there is plenty left to do. OpenAI choosing a PCB for one of Astra's first demos and xAI publishing EEBench in a model card both feel like early signs of the same thing: AI labs are starting to take electronics seriously. There may be another data point very soon. Elon Musk has said that Grok 4.7 is coming within weeks after additional training on a large collection of SpaceX data, with the aim of making it especially good at engineering. The model is not out and the schedule may move, but if it arrives as described, we will be keen to put it on EEBench. It looks like we are in for an interesting few weeks. We will keep adding harder tasks as the models improve, and we are looking forward to seeing how Astra and the next generation perform. You can try the same approach in atopile today. Give the agent a board you have been meaning to build and see how far it gets. So, can AI design circuit boards yet? Some of them, yes. We still would not ask it to design a pacemaker and blindly install the result. But we are on the way there. EEBench is built and funded by the team behind atopile. We pay for the public benchmark runs and do not sell benchmark scores.