NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Anthropic collaborated to conduct an experiment to “determine the travel path of a Mars probe using AI.” The experiment was actually successful along the route taken by Claude, and the Mars rover “perseverance‘ traveled a total of 456 meters.

NASA’s Perseverance spacecraft completes first AI-driven drive to Mars | NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-perseverance-rover-completes-first-ai-planned-drive-on-mars/

Claude on Mars\Humanity
https://www.anthropic.com/features/claude-on-mars

Perseverance is a Mars rover equipped with a large number of cameras and sensors, and since arriving on Mars in February 2021, it has been collecting data while moving on the surface of Mars. Therefore, in order for Perseverance to travel, experts on Earth must determine the travel route in advance based on topographical data. Once the route has been determined, waypoints are specified at intervals of 100 meters or less, and Perseverance automatically navigates between the waypoints.

Specifying waypoints is a very difficult task. For example, in 2009, the Mars rover “Spirit” followed a waypoint, but as a result, its wheels got caught in sand and the project was terminated. This experiment was conducted with the aim of using AI to specify waypoints to improve work efficiency and enable response to difficult terrain.

JPL engineers input important data and knowledge from their experience into the Claude Code, including concentrated areas, Martian topography data, and satellite imagery. Claude Code analyzes the input information to identify terrain features such as “dangerous rocks” and “sand conditions” and generates Perseverance’s travel route and waypoints. Additionally, commands for perseverance were written in the Rover Markup language, a dedicated markup language, based on the generated waypoints.

To verify that the Claude code instructions were suitable for Perseverance, the project team used Perseverance’s digital twin to examine over 500,000 variables. Furthermore, the command was actually sent after a human engineer fine-tuned the command with reference to “a camera image of the ground surface that was not entered in the Claude code.”

The AI-instructed runs were carried out on Mars Day 1707 (December 8, 2025) and Mars Day 1709 (December 10, 2025) from the start of Perseverance’s flight. The mileage was 210 meters for 1707 Mars Day and 246 meters for 1709 Mars Day. The image below shows the “route planned by AI (red)” and “route actually traveled by Perseverance (orange)” on the 1709 Mars day.

In the video below, you can see the surface of the Earth photographed during the progression of the 1709 Mars day.

View of Crater Rim Drive from Perseverance Rover – YouTube

A video modeling the movement has also been released.

Visualizing Mars Drive with Perseverance’s AI Plan – YouTube

The light blue circular area in the upper left of the image is a waypoint, the light blue line extending near Perseverance’s wheels depicts the expected route, and the black line extending ahead indicates the route options developed by the autonomous driving system.

The project team estimates that by using AI to plan travel routes, the planning time will be cut in half.