The six-wheeled Perseverance rover has completed its first Mars drives planned by artificial intelligence, marking a major milestone in autonomous space exploration, NASA announced.
The demonstration took place on December 8 and 10, 2025, when generative AI was used to create navigation waypoints for the Perseverance rover. Until now, this complex route-planning task has always been carried out manually by human rover planners at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.
According to NASA, the AI system relied on vision-language models to analyze existing images and surface data from Mars. Using the same information that human planners normally use, the AI generated safe routes that allowed the rover to move autonomously across the planet’s rough terrain.
“This demonstration shows how far our capabilities have advanced and broadens how we will explore other worlds,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. He added that autonomous technologies can help future missions operate more efficiently, especially as spacecraft travel farther from Earth.
The AI-driven experiment was led from JPL’s Rover Operations Center in collaboration with Anthropic, using the company’s Claude models. With AI-generated waypoints uploaded into its system, Perseverance drove 689 feet (210 meters) on December 8 and 807 feet (246 meters) two days later — all without human route planners directing the path.
Perseverance, which has been exploring Mars since 2021, continues to study the planet’s geology and atmosphere while collecting samples. NASA says this AI milestone could play a crucial role in future missions, where real-time human control becomes increasingly difficult due to distance.
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