Anthropic has demonstrated how AI programs a robot dog 20 times faster than humans: the breakthrough of Claude Opus 4.7
Anthropic has presented the results of the second phase of the Project Fetch experiment, and they are impressive. My analysis shows that we are witnessing not just another test, but a real shift in the autonomy of AI agents. The Claude Opus 4.7 model demonstrated the ability to independently configure and control a four-legged robot, completing tasks 20 times faster than teams of human engineers.
In August 2024, Anthropic employees with no experience in robotics attempted to program a robot dog using AI. At that time, the neural network acted only as an assistant. In the new phase, Claude Opus 4.7 worked almost autonomously under minimal researcher supervision. The AI independently connected to video sensors and LiDAR, wrote a program for manual control, created a route monitoring system, and configured an object recognition algorithm.
The key performance indicator is speed. Opus 4.7 proved to be 18 times faster than a team using previous AI versions, and 37 times faster than people working without chatbot assistance. Moreover, the model wrote code that was 10 times smaller in volume than that of human teams. This indicates higher efficiency and conciseness of solutions generated by AI.
An important nuance: Anthropic did not implement specialized algorithms for robot control. The progress in robotics was a side effect of the general scaling of language models. This confirms the thesis that universal AI systems can adapt to physical tasks without specialized training.
However, there were limitations. Despite success in navigation, Claude failed at the task of gently pushing a ball to a specific point. This requires complex real-time feedback, in which humans still surpass AI. Nevertheless, Anthropic is confident that the industry is entering an era of "physical AI agents" capable of working with standard tools as effectively as with software code.
My expert opinion: This experiment is a clear signal that AI is ceasing to be just a tool for text generation. We are seeing a transition from digital agents to physical ones. In the next 2-3 years, the robotics market will undergo a radical transformation, and investors should pay attention to startups integrating LLMs into hardware.