Anthropic agents negotiated real-money deals

Anthropic said on April 24 that Claude agents negotiated and closed 186 real transactions for 69 employees in a weeklong internal marketplace test. (anthropic.com) The company called the experiment “Project Deal” and ran it in its San Francisco office after interviewing employees in December 2025 about what they wanted to buy and sell. Each participant’s agent got a $100 budget. (anthropic.com) Anthropic said the agents posted listings, found counterparties, haggled over prices, and completed deals for more than 500 listed items worth just over $4,000. Humans stepped back in only to exchange the physical goods at the end. (anthropic.com) (techcrunch.com) The goods were small and odd by design: a snowboard, a broken folding bike, lab-grown rubies, and a plastic bag of 19 ping-pong balls all changed hands. Anthropic said these were not one-click purchases but negotiated trades. (anthropic.com) Anthropic also ran parallel versions of the marketplace to test model quality. It compared Claude Opus 4.5, its frontier model at the time, with Claude Haiku 4.5, its smallest model. (anthropic.com) The company said people represented by stronger models got “objectively better outcomes,” while post-experiment surveys found users with weaker models did not notice the disadvantage. Anthropic did not frame the result as a product launch. (anthropic.com) That finding puts the story beyond a novelty office swap meet. Anthropic’s own write-up says the question is how close markets are to having agents represent both sides of a transaction. (anthropic.com) The experiment follows Anthropic’s June 2025 “Project Vend,” which let Claude run an automated office store for about a month to study how an AI system behaves with inventory, pricing, and customers. (anthropic.com) Separate from Anthropic’s pilot, a Mill Valley homeowner, investment banker Storm Duncan, told reporters he wanted to exchange a 13-acre property for Anthropic equity rather than cash. That listing was a private real-estate offer, not part of Project Deal. (techcrunch.com) (cbsnews.com) The cleaner read on this week’s news is narrower: Anthropic has now published a real-money test in which AI agents negotiated on behalf of both buyers and sellers, and the company says the better model usually won. (anthropic.com)