Anthropic has achieved a breakthrough: Claude Opus 4.7 controls a robot dog 20 times faster than engineers
Anthropic has presented the results of the second phase of the Project Fetch experiment, and the results are impressive. My team has carefully analyzed the data: the Claude Opus 4.7 model handled the setup and control of a four-legged robot 20 times faster than teams of human engineers who worked on it last year. This is not just evolution — it is a paradigm shift.
How AI Surpassed Humans
In August 2024, employees with no experience in robotics relied on AI as an assistant. Now, Claude Opus 4.7 acted almost autonomously, with minimal supervision from a researcher. The neural network independently completed the full cycle: connected to video sensors and LiDAR, wrote a program for manual control, created a trajectory monitoring system, and configured an object recognition algorithm.
The key metric is speed. Opus 4.7 proved to be 18 times faster than teams using previous versions of AI, and 37 times faster than people working without chatbot assistance. At the same time, the volume of code written was reduced by 10 times. This indicates that the model generates not just fast, but exceptionally efficient solutions.
Why This Matters for the Market
The experiment's authors emphasize that progress in robotics has become a side effect of the general scaling of language models. Anthropic did not introduce specialized algorithms for controlling hardware. This means that any major AI provider can replicate such a result without additional investment in R&D.
However, one should not think that humans are no longer needed. Claude still struggles with precise physical manipulations. The model guided the robot to the goal but could not neatly push a ball to the right spot. Such tasks require complex real-time feedback, in which humans still outperform AI.
Anthropic is confident that the industry is entering an era of "physical AI agents." Neural networks will soon be able to work with standard tools and equipment as effectively as they currently work with software code.
My expert assessment: This experiment is a clear signal for investors. Companies that integrate AI into physical systems (logistics, manufacturing, drones) will gain a tremendous competitive advantage in the next 12-18 months. However, the human factor should not be discounted: in tasks requiring fine motor skills and adaptation to the chaos of the real world, humans remain irreplaceable.