The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Perseverance rover has successfully completed its first artificial intelligence (AI) powered drive on another planet.
The Endurance used an AI model, Claude, developed by Anthropic, to design a 400 meter safe route across Jezero Carter’s rocky terrain. The plan was executed on December 8 and 10, 2025.
Previously, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) did this manually.
Since Mars is an average of 140 million miles away from Earth, it creates a communication delay of about 20 minutes, making it unable to drive rovers in real time.
Instead, operators carefully plan a series of waypoints, also known as the “breadcrumb trail,” using orbit images and rover data, which the rover then follows autonomously between points.
For this test, engineers fed Claude years of mission data in context.
The AI system analyzed high-resolution orbit images, detected hazards such as boulder fields and sand waves, and produced a continuous trajectory.
It even produced the commands in the rover’s specialized programming language.
Before deployment, JPL engineers verified it via standard verification simulation and checked over 500,000 variables.
A minor adjustment was needed after testing. The result was that persistence ran 689ft and then 807ft on the two sols (Marian days), completing the AI-planned route without issue.
