Claude plans a Perseverance rover drive on Mars with NASA JPL, billed as the first AI-planned drive on another planet
Confirmed
The takeaway
The plan passed JPL’s usual simulation checks, engineers made only minor changes, and the rover completed the path.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 27 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Drives: Dec 8 and Dec 10, 2025 (Martian sols 1707 and 1709), about 400 m through a rock field (Anthropic feature page)
- Method (Anthropic): Claude analysed overhead imagery, built the path in 10-metre segments, revised its own waypoints and wrote the commands in Rover Markup Language; JPL fed years of rover-driving data and experience to Claude Code
- Checks: the plan went through JPL’s simulation modelling more than 500,000 variables before upload; engineers only split one corridor more finely after looking at ground-level images
- Claimed benefit: engineers estimate AI-assisted planning could cut route-planning time in half; framed as a test for autonomy on Artemis lunar missions and future probes to Europa or Titan
- Publication date of Anthropic’s page not shown on the page; the claim ‘first AI-planned drive on another planet’ is Anthropic’s
What happened
Rover drives are normally planned by JPL “rover planners” from orbital and ground images. For this test Claude did the planning work end to end inside JPL’s normal checks, and the rover executed the route.
Sources
1 source from 1 site. Numbers match the chips in the text.
1 source: 1 primary
Primary
- Anthropic: Claude on Marsanthropic.com, official
Changes
- Filed from Anthropic’s feature page