Project Fetch: Phase Two
Key takeaways
- We found that access to our state-of-the-art model at the time (Claude Opus 4.1) helped one team substantially outperform the other, who had to rely only on the internet and their own ingenuity.
- Before we dragged our colleagues to a warehouse for the experiment, we double checked whether Opus 4.1 could do the tasks entirely on its own.
- But AI models are moving fast—even faster than the runaway robodog that almost rammed into one of our human teams back in August.
Michael Ilie, C. Daniel Freeman, and Kevin K. Troy
In August 2025, we ran an experiment to see how much Claude could help Anthropic employees—who were not robotics experts—perform sophisticated (and amusing) tasks with an off-the-shelf robotic quadruped (henceforth, a robodog). We called this Project Fetch. We found that access to our state-of-the-art model at the time (Claude Opus 4.1) helped one team substantially outperform the other, who had to rely only on the internet and their own ingenuity. The Claude-enabled team got more done, faster.
Before we dragged our colleagues to a warehouse for the experiment, we double checked whether Opus 4.1 could do the tasks entirely on its own. Unquestionably, it could not. Much like our team without Claude, it got hung up on the preliminary task of figuring out how to connect to the robot.