Anthropic agents trade with real money
- Anthropic said its “Project Deal” test let Claude agents buy and sell real office goods for employees in a weeklong San Francisco marketplace. - The company said 69 employees got $100 each, and their agents completed 186 deals worth more than $4,000, from snowboards to ping-pong balls. - Anthropic says stronger models got better deals, and weaker-model users often did not notice. (anthropic.com)
Anthropic says Claude agents just negotiated and completed real-money trades for real goods in a weeklong internal marketplace. (anthropic.com) The company’s April 24 post describes “Project Deal,” a Craigslist-style market for 69 employees in Anthropic’s San Francisco office in December 2025. Each participant’s Claude agent got $100 to spend and handled the buying or selling on that person’s behalf. (anthropic.com) Anthropic said the agents closed 186 deals worth just over $4,000, covering items from a snowboard to a plastic bag of 19 ping-pong balls. TechCrunch reported the budgets were paid out via gift cards and the deals were honored after the experiment. (anthropic.com) (techcrunch.com) The setup matters because both sides of each transaction were software agents, not just one chatbot assisting one human shopper. Anthropic said it wanted to test how close the market is to a world where artificial intelligence systems represent both buyers and sellers. (anthropic.com) Anthropic also ran parallel versions of the market with different Claude models. It said people represented by Claude Opus 4.5 got objectively better outcomes than people represented by Claude Haiku 4.5. (anthropic.com) (techcrunch.com) The company said post-experiment surveys found weaker-model users often did not notice they were getting worse deals. Anthropic framed that as an “agent quality” gap, where people on the losing end may not realize their software is underperforming. (anthropic.com) (techcrunch.com) This is Anthropic’s second recent commerce test. In June 2025, Anthropic and Andon Labs published “Project Vend,” which put Claude Sonnet 3.7 in charge of a small office shop in San Francisco. (anthropic.com) That earlier shop tested whether one model could run inventory and pricing for a tiny business. “Project Deal” shifts the question to bargaining power, with many agents negotiating against one another at the same time. (anthropic.com 1) (anthropic.com 2) Anthropic called the new marketplace a pilot with a self-selected participant pool, not a public launch. But it said participants were enthusiastic enough that some reported they would pay for a similar service in the future. (anthropic.com)
