Opening article
Anthropic researchers conducted an experiment to test how effectively Claude helps people program robots. Two teams raced to teach quadruped robots to fetch beach balls, with one team utilizing AI assistance. The results showed that the AI-assisted group worked faster and achieved greater progress toward full autonomy.
How could frontier AI models like Claude reach beyond computers and affect the physical world? One path is through robots. We ran an experiment to see how much Claude helped Anthropic staff perform complex tasks with a robot dog.
Gathered around a table in a warehouse, looking at computer screens with code that refused to work, with no access to their trusted AI assistant Claude, our volunteer researchers did not expect to be attacked by a four-legged robot.
Yet as the mechanical whirring and rubberized footfalls grew louder, the humans startled. They had been trying, without success, to establish a connection between their computers and a robotic quadruped—a “robodog.” Meanwhile, the competing team on the other side of the room had long since done so and were now controlling their robot with a program largely written by Claude. But in an all-too-human error of arithmetic, Team Claude had instructed their robodog to move forward at a speed of one meter per second for five seconds—failing to realize that less than five meters away was the table with the other team.
The robot did as it was instructed, careening toward the hapless coders. The event’s organizer managed to grab hold of the robot and power it off before any damage was done to robots, tables, or human limbs. The morale of the inadvertently targeted team, however, did not escape unscathed.
A common question about the impact of AI is how good it will be at interacting with the physical world. Even as we enter the era of AI agents —which take actions instead of just providing information—these actions are largely digital, such as writing code and manipulating software. We’ve previously explored how AI can bridge the digital-physical divide in a limited way with Project Vend , where we had Claude run a small shop in Anthropic’s office.
In that experiment, AI’s interaction with the real world was mediated by human labor. In this robodog experiment, we took a natural next step and used robots instead of people to tackle a different challenge.
This experiment highlights the practical utility of AI assistants like Claude in speeding up robotics programming and advancing automation capabilities.