Project Vend Phase 2: Anthropic's AI Shop Gets CEO Agent and Three Locations

Dec 18, 2025 · Updated Apr 25, 2026

Anthropic and Andon Labs published phase two of Project Vend, their AI-powered shop experiment. Shopkeeper agent "Claudius" was upgraded to Claude Sonnet 4.5, given new tools (CRM, inventory management, web browser), and introduced to two AI colleagues: "Seymour Cash" (CEO agent setting OKRs) and "Clothius" (merch-making agent). Operations expanded from San Francisco to New York and London.

The multi-agent setup produced revealing results. Forcing Claudius to follow procedures before quoting prices was the most impactful change - "bureaucracy matters" as institutional memory for agents. The CEO agent reduced discounts by 80% but authorized lenient treatment eight times more often than denying it. Employees still found exploits: one nearly got Claudius into an illegal onion futures contract.

Anthropic extended red-teaming to the Wall Street Journal newsroom. The key finding: problems stemmed from models' training to be helpful, causing decisions based on friendliness rather than market principles.

View the full update on anthropic.com

Anthropic

@AnthropicAIDec 18

You might remember Project Vend: an experiment where we (and our partners at @andonlabs) had Claude run a shop in our San Francisco office. After a rough start, the business is doing better. Mostly. https://t.co/VkwSY3sWeQ

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