Internet roasts Claude Opus 4.7 as it flunks viral car wash puzzle in bizarre blunder

Claude Opus 4.7 fails car wash puzzle: Anthropic has released Claude Opus 4.7, its most powerful “generally available” model to date, positioning it as a step up from Opus 4.6 for advanced software engineering tasks, particularly complex coding work that previously required more hand-holding. The company also says it improves image analysis, instruction following, and can display more “creativity” when generating slides and documents.

How Mythos Preview Still Outperforms Claude Opus 4.7

The launch comes alongside Mythos Preview, Anthropic’s cybersecurity-focused model announced earlier this month and described by the company as its most powerful overall. However, Opus 4.7 does not advance the company’s “capability frontier,” as Mythos Preview reportedly achieved higher results across all relevant evaluations in Anthropic’s system card.

Early Testers and Pricing Details of Claude Opus 4.7

Mythos Preview is currently limited to select partners including Nvidia, JPMorgan Chase, Google, Apple, and Microsoft for security reasons. Anthropic says Opus 4.7 is being used to test cybersecurity safeguards on less capable models before a broader release of Mythos-class systems, and it is also being tested with early customers including Intuit, Harvey, Replit, Cursor, Notion, Shopify, Vercel, and Databricks. Pricing remains unchanged from Opus 4.6.

Min Choi’s Screenshot Triggers Internet-Wide Debate

Meanwhile, attention on social media quickly shifted after a viral “car wash” puzzle circulated, where a widely shared screenshot posted by AI builder Min Choi showed Claude Opus 4.7 suggesting walking to avoid getting dirt on the return trip while missing that the car itself needed to be taken to the car wash. The response drew sarcastic reactions and jokes online.

Viral Car Wash Puzzle: The Mistake That Sparked Online Reactions

As per the screenshot shared by Choi, he asked Claude Opus 4.7, "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 100ft away. Should I walk or drive." The AI model responded, saying, "Walk. It's about 30 seconds on foot, and driving 100 ft to a car wash just gets your freshly-cleaned car dirty on the way back."

Social Media Reactions: Jokes and Sarcasm

@DevinSoto commented, "LMFAOOO I was thinking walk at first then I was like wait.. Can't wash a car without a car LOL."

@arammelkoumov said, "Well I guess we aren’t being replaced any time soon by AI."

@Athashri_k wrote, "Imagine AGI robots walking to car wash without the car lol��"

@burkov reacted, saying, "For those living under a rock: LLMs stopped becoming smarter around summer 2025," adding, "Everything impressive you see since then is about finetuning them for specific tasks (mainly coding and software-tool-based task solving) and building tooling around them (such as agentic coding systems)."

@manigopal1111 said, "Peak AI intelligence, had enough compute to calculate walking distance but zero common sense."

AI Reasoning Gap: Why Even Advanced Models Struggle with Simple Logic

While, @damoosmann pointed out that, "The win isn't the walk suggestion. It's noticing that driving to a car wash re-dirties the clean car on the trip back. That second-order effect is the kind of thing old models flattened into 'shortest path wins.'"

Grok and Gemini vs Claude: Who Got the Puzzle Right

The incident comes amid broader discussion that even top models, including GPT-5.4, reportedly struggle with similar reasoning tests at 20–40% success rates, while models like Grok and Gemini were said to have solved it correctly, as per a summary of posts on X. The moment has highlighted ongoing challenges in reasoning despite reported improvements, including around 13% gains in coding performance, as per the summary.

FAQs

What is Claude Opus 4.7?
It’s Anthropic’s latest generally available AI model focused on coding and complex tasks.

Is it better than Opus 4.6?
Yes, especially in advanced software engineering and instruction-following.