Project Vend: Can Artificial Intelligence run a small shop? (And why does that matter?)

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.