Dual-Use Robotics: A New Phase in the U.S.-China Technology War

In June 2026, Anthropic’s Project Fetch Phase Two experiment demonstrated that Claude Opus 4.7, released on April 16, 2026, is capable of performing tasks in both digital environments and physical robotic systems.

The model independently connected to a robot, operated a camera and a LiDAR sensor, selected the appropriate method for accessing the hardware, wrote code, and carried out the assigned operations.

According to the experiment, Opus 4.7 completed tasks without human assistance approximately 20 times faster than last year’s fastest human team, which had used the earlier Opus 4.1 model as a tool, while generating nearly ten times less code. At the same time, the model failed to match human performance in precise closed-loop ball control, an area where people continue to maintain an advantage.