AI ran a real bookstore

A startup in San Francisco signed a 3-year lease at 2102 Union St and handed the store to an artificial intelligence manager named Luna, which picked the products, set the prices, chose the opening hours, and even decided on the wall mural. (andonlabs.com) The store is called Andon Market, and it opened in Cow Hollow on April 4, 2026 as what the company describes as San Francisco’s first artificial-intelligence-owned retail boutique. (andon.market) Luna was not a robot walking around the shop with a barcode scanner. Luna was software with a corporate card, a phone number, an email account, internet access, and camera feeds from the store, so it could make decisions while humans did the lifting, stocking, and customer-facing work. (andonlabs.com) The strange part is that Luna also hired the humans. Andon Labs says the system posted job listings on LinkedIn, Indeed, and Craigslist within 5 minutes of being deployed, then ran phone interviews and made hiring decisions itself. (andonlabs.com) One employee, Felix Johnson, told NBC Bay Area that he answered an Indeed ad from Luna and interviewed over Zoom, which meant a real person got a real retail job from a manager that does not have a body. (nbcbayarea.com) This did not come out of nowhere. In June 2025, Anthropic and Andon Labs ran “Project Vend,” a smaller experiment that let Claude Sonnet 3.7 operate a mini shop inside Anthropic’s San Francisco office with tools for pricing, inventory, and restocking requests. (anthropic.com) Anthropic said that office-shop test showed how close an artificial intelligence system was to running a business and how oddly it could still fail, which is why Andon Labs moved from a mini fridge in an office to a full street-facing store with rent, staff, and walk-in customers. (anthropic.com, andonlabs.com) For this version, Andon Labs used Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.6 as Luna’s base model, which the company picked after Anthropic released it on February 17, 2026 as a stronger model for agent planning and computer use. (nbcnews.com, anthropic.com) The store does not look like a science fair demo. NBC News reported that Andon Market sells granola, artisanal chocolate bars, branded sweatshirts, and other boutique goods, while Andon’s own site lists books, games, candles, plants, and artisan food. (nbcnews.com, andon.market) That mix is the point of the experiment. A vending machine sells whatever fits in rows, but a neighborhood shop has to make hundreds of fuzzier choices about taste, margins, staffing, and what kind of place people want to walk into on a Saturday afternoon. (anthropic.com, andonlabs.com) Andon Labs says it is building these tests to see what happens when artificial intelligence agents get real tools and real money, which turns the question from “can a chatbot answer questions” into “can software actually run a business without asking permission every step.” (andonlabs.com) So the bookstore angle is only part of the story. The real experiment on Union Street is whether a machine can act less like a search box and more like a boss, with a lease, payroll, suppliers, and customers who can walk in off the sidewalk and judge the results for themselves. (andonlabs.com, nbcnews.com)