NASA Watch
January 31, 2026
400 Meters on Mars – Anthropic Link
Keith’s note: NASA posted this interesting news on Friday: “Perseverance Rover Completes First AI-Planned Drive on Mars“. This is a standard press release thing without much thought as to how it could be enhanced and re-purposed synergistically. Don’t mention the astrobiology or astrogeology science either. Just write it and push it out – on a Friday afternoon. In fact it could be used to leverage things NASA wants to be known for outside of the JPL robotics bubble. Done properly, White House OSTP; the tech, science, and commerce sectors; and other trending initiatives could be leveraged so as to boost visibility of NASA’s participation. But NASA is still kinda shy about all of that self promotion. NASA could do a vastly better job promoting all of its cool tech. Indeed, as budgets shrink NASA needs to do a much better job explaining itself. The Moon mission glow will (sadly) fade all too soon. (More below)
This accomplishment is an interesting convergence of science, exploration, commerce, and policy: space exploration, advanced robotics, AI, use of a commercial AI package – all at a time when a new NASA Administrator needs to make some news about how he plans to reboot/rethink how NASA continues to lead the way in space exploration. Add in the fact that the White House OSTP recently initiated the Genesis Mission for AI. Gee, NASA is doing this AI stuff on another planet. Add in the agency’s potent branding reach and NASA could really be out there in the global conversation showing the world how things are done. Some snippets from the NASA release that point to things that should be further expanded:
“NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has completed the first drives on another world that were planned by artificial intelligence.” [no one has ever done anything like this before]
“This demonstration shows how far our capabilities have advanced and broadens how we will explore other worlds,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “Autonomous technologies like this can help missions to operate more efficiently, respond to challenging terrain, and increase science return as distance from Earth grows. It’s a strong example of teams applying new technology carefully and responsibly in real operations.” [Focusing on taking the helm at NASA and moving out to make things happen]
“The initiative was led out of JPL’s Rover Operations Center (ROC) in collaboration with Anthropic, using the company’s Claude AI models.” [Look at these Anthropic @AnthropicAI tweets [1] [2]. Anthropic is pulling out all the stops to promote its Mars AI demo. It has also made regular supportive commentary for the current Administrations’ AI and tech efforts].
Just sayin’
NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.