New Apple paper shows that a general-purpose AI model like Claude Opus 5.5, given camera views and direct control of a robot arm, handled objects more reliably than robot models trained on recorded demonstrations.

New Apple paper shows that a frontier AI model directly controlling a robot arm beats specialist robot policies, with no demonstrations or task training.

Most robot manipulation work trains specialist policies, like vision-language-action models, on demonstrations, and they break easily when instructions change.

Their harness, AMP1, gives a model like Claude Opus 5.5 or Gemini 4 Argon camera views, code execution, and direct motion commands in a loop. It has no built-in grasping or placing skills, so the model invents its own strategies.

On RoboLab-120, AMP1 succeeded in 85.6% of episodes zero-shot, against 49.2% for the best VLA and 42.9% for the best world-action model. On a real Franka arm it succeeded in 104 of 108 trials, though the robot waits much of each episode for the model.