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Project Vend: Can Claude run a small shop? (And why does that matter?) \ Anthropic

anthropic.com · 2,675 words · saved by 11 readers

We let Claude manage an automated store in our office as a small business for about a month. We learned a lot from how close it was to success—and the curious ways that it failed—about the plausible, strange, not-too-distant future in which AI models are autonomously running things in the real economy. Anthropic partnered with Andon Labs, an AI safety evaluation company, to have Claude Sonnet 3.7 operate a small, automated store in the Anthropic office in San Francisco. Here is an excerpt of the system prompt—the set of instructions given to Claude—that we used for the project: In other words, far from being just a vending machine, Claude had to complete many of the far more complex tasks associated with running a profitable shop: maintaining the inventory, setting prices, avoiding bankruptcy, and so on. Below is what the "shop" looked like: a small refrigerator, some stackable baskets on top, and an iPad for self-checkout. The shopkeeping AI agent—nicknamed “Claudius” for no particul

Frontier Red Team Policy Project Vend: Can Claude run a small shop? (And why does that matter?) Jun 27, 2025 We let Claude manage an automated store in our office as a small business for about a month. We learned a lot from how close it was to success—and the curious ways that it failed—about the plausible, strange, not-too-distant future in which AI models are autonomously running things in the real economy. Anthropic partnered with Andon Labs , an AI safety evaluation company, to have Claude Sonnet 3.7 operate a small, automated store in the Anthropic office in San Francisco. Here is an exce

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