NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has completed the first drives on another world that were planned by artificial intelligence. The historic event occurred on December 8 and 10, 2025, led out of JPL’s Rover Operations Center (ROC) in collaboration with Anthropic, using the company’s Claude AI models.
How Claude Planned the Route:
JPL engineers gathered together the data and experience they’d gained from years of driving the rover, and provided it to Claude Code. With all this extra information, Claude used its coding skills to write commands in Rover Markup Language—the bespoke, XML-based programming language originally developed for the Mars Exploration Rover mission. Using its vision capabilities to analyze the overhead images, Claude planned Perseverance’s breadcrumb trail point by point for sol 1707 and sol 1709. It strung together ten-meter segments into a path, then iterated to refine the waypoints—critiquing its own work and suggesting revisions.
Mission Success:
On December 8, the rover drove 689 feet (210 meters), guided by Claude’s route. On December 10, it continued an additional 807 feet (245.9 meters), bringing the total trip length to 1,496 feet (455.9 meters).
Future Implications:
Engineers estimate that using Claude to map Martian journeys in the future will cut route-planning time in half. This represents a major breakthrough in using advanced AI models for complex mission-critical planning tasks in space exploration.