NASA’s Perseverance Completes First AI-Planned Drive on Mars Using Anthropic’s Claude

NASA’s Perseverance rover has completed the first AI-planned drive on another planet, according to Anthropic. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) used Anthropic’s Claude AI model to generate the route for two drives on December 8 and 10, 2025, covering roughly 400 meters across Jezero Crater on Mars.

The JPL team provided Claude with contextual data from previous rover operations, allowing the model to analyze orbital and surface imagery and create a sequence of waypoints for Perseverance. The AI-generated route was then verified through JPL’s simulation environment, which modeled over 500,000 telemetry variables to ensure the rover’s safety before execution.

Minor adjustments were made by engineers after reviewing ground-level imagery, but the AI’s plan largely held. The drives marked the first time a large language model has assisted in planetary navigation, reducing route-planning time and improving operational efficiency.

NASA’s demonstration showed how generative AI could support autonomous navigation for future missions, potentially enabling rovers and probes to plan routes and make decisions with minimal human input as communication delays increase with distance from Earth.