Claude's Perseverance route ran through JPL's daily simulator

On December 8 and 10, 2025 (sols 1707 and 1709), NASA's Perseverance rover drove about 400 meters through a rock field along waypoints planned by Claude. In Anthropic's feature on the drive, JPL engineers describe loading Claude Code with years of driving data and experience. The model then read overhead images, laid out the route in ten-meter segments, critiqued and revised its own plan, and wrote the commands in Rover Markup Language, the XML-based language built for the earlier Mars Exploration Rover mission.

Each plan then went through the same simulation that checks Perseverance's commands every day, modeling over 500,000 variables to predict the rover's positions and any hazards. The human drivers made only minor edits. Ground-level camera images, which Claude had not been given, showed sand ripples beside a narrow corridor, so the drivers split that stretch more finely. Claude planned from the overhead view while the humans refined the path using the close up images. JPL's engineers estimate the approach will cut route-planning time in half.

The part that transfers to anyone deploying agents on real equipment is the order of operations. JPL did not build a new safety net for Claude; it reused the one that already vets every human-planned drive, and the agent's output had to pass it like anyone else's. Most companies that want agents writing control code, configs, or migrations have no equivalent control plane, and building it is likely most of the work.