Anthropic’s Claude has been put to the test in Pokémon Red and so far, the AI hasn’t exactly been a champion. Instead of storming through the game, Claude often gets stuck, struggles with navigation, and fails to make steady progress. It’s a revealing look at how even advanced models stumble with long-term planning.
Why Pokémon? The game’s turn-based format strips away real-time chaos, making it a clean test of reasoning. And while Claude Sonnet often lost coherence, the newer Claude 4 Opus shows clear improvement: it can grind through tasks for 24 hours straight, train when needed, and keep moving forward.
The real takeaway isn’t about video games, it’s about building reliable AI agents. From managing workflows to solving multi-step problems, success depends on persistence and memory. Anthropic is cautious, flagging its latest models with higher safety levels, but experiments like this show how close we’re getting to AIs that can truly act with agency.
You can read the full story at Ars Technica
