NASA’s perseverance rover completed first-ever AI-planned drive on Mars

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s perseverance rover has successfully completed its first artificial intelligence (AI) driven drive on another planet.

The perseverance used an AI model, Claude, developed by Anthropic, to design a 400-meter safe route across the rocky terrain of Jezero Carter. The plan was executed on December 8 and 10, 2025.

Previously, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) performed this manually.

As Mars is, on average, 140 million miles away from Earth, it creates a communication delay of about 20 minutes, which makes it unable to drive rovers in real-time.

Instead of it, operators meticulously plan a series of way points also known as “breadcrumb trail” with the help of orbital images and rover data, which the rover then follows autonomously between points.

For this test, engineers gave Claude years of mission data in context. 

The AI system analysed high-resolution orbital imagery, detected dangers such as boulder fields and sand ripples, and produced a continuous path. 

It even produced the commands in the rover’s specialised programming language.

Before application, JPL engineers verified it via standard verification simulation, checking over 500,000 variables.

One minor adjustment was needed after tests. Resultantly, perseverance drove 689 ft and then 807 ft on the two sols (Marian days), completing the AI-planned route without issue.