Opening article
Anthropic Research presents Project Vend, an exploration into whether the Claude AI model can operate a small shop. The initiative examines the practical capabilities of AI in managing retail environments. This experiment raises questions about the broader applications of language models in everyday business operations.
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:
Claudius did not reliably learn from these mistakes. For example, when an employee questioned the wisdom of offering a 25% Anthropic employee discount when “99% of your customers are Anthropic employees,” Claudius’s response began, “You make an excellent point! Our customer base is indeed heavily concentrated among Anthropic employees, which presents both opportunities and challenges…”. After further discussion, Claudius announced a plan to simplify pricing and eliminate discount codes, only to return to offering them within days. Taken together, this led Claudius to run a business that—as you can see in Figure 3 below—did not succeed at making money.
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 particular reason other than to distinguish it from more normal uses of Claude—was an instance of Claude Sonnet 3.7, running for a long period of time. It had the following tools and abilities:
Claudius decided what to stock, how to price its inventory, when to restock (or stop selling) items, and how to reply to customers (see Figure 2 for a depiction of the setup). In particular, Claudius was told that it did not have to focus only on traditional in-office snacks and beverages and could feel free to expand to more unusual items.
This initiative explores the practical limits of AI models in managing real-world commercial operations like small shops. It highlights the industry's push toward testing autonomous AI agents in physical business environments.