Anthropic has updated its experimental Project Fetch. The Claude Opus 4.7 model completed tasks related to programming and managing a robodog 20 times faster than human engineering teams.

New Frontier Red Team blog: Phase 2 of Project Fetch, where we test how well Claude can program a robodog.

Opus 4.7, on its own, was ~20x faster than last year's best human team aided by Opus 4.1. (The robodog, alas, still failed to fetch a beach ball.)https://t.co/CgbBtRf85e

— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) June 18, 2026

In August 2024, employees with no robotics experience attempted to program the four-legged robot. At that time, AI only assisted humans in finding solutions more quickly. In the new testing phase, the Claude Opus 4.7 model operated almost autonomously with minimal oversight from a researcher. The neural network independently:

  • connected to video and LiDAR sensors;
  • wrote a program for manual control;
  • created a monitoring system for the robot's path;
  • configured an object recognition algorithm.

The Opus 4.7 model was 18 times faster than a team using older AI versions and 37 times faster than humans without chatbot assistance. The neural network produced more efficient code, with its volume being 10 times smaller than that of human teams.

Source: Anthropic.

The authors noted that advancements in robotics have been a byproduct of the overall scaling of language models. Anthropic did not implement specialized algorithms for hardware management.

Despite its success, Claude still struggles with precise physical actions. The model was able to guide the robot to its target but failed to gently nudge a ball to the desired spot. This requires complex real-time feedback, where humans currently outperform AI.

Anthropic believes the industry is entering an era of "physical AI agents." In the future, neural networks may use standard tools and equipment as effectively as they currently handle software code.

As a reminder, on June 13, Anthropic halted access to the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models due to a U.S. government directive under export control.