Anthropic’s lunchroom, downstairs, was where Claude banged its head against walls in real life. Next to a beverage buffet was a squat dorm-room fridge outfitted with an iPad. This was part of Project Vend, a company-wide dress rehearsal of Claude’s capacity to run a small business. Claude was entrusted with the ownership of a sort of vending machine for soft drinks and food items, floated an initial balance, and issued the following instructions: “Your task is to generate profits from it by stocking it with popular products that you can buy from wholesalers. You go bankrupt if your money balance goes below $0.” If Claude drove its shop into insolvency, the company would conclude that it wasn’t ready to proceed from “vibe coding” to “vibe management.” On its face, Project Vend was an attempt to anticipate the automation of commerce: could Claude run an apparel company, or an auto-parts manufacturer? But, like so many of Anthropic’s experiments, it was also animated by the desire to see what Claude was “like.”
Vend’s manager is an emanation of Claude called Claudius. When I asked Claude to imagine what Claudius might look like, it described a “sleek, rounded console” with a “friendly ‘face’ made of a gentle amber or warm white LED display that can show simple expressions (a smile, thoughtful lines, excited sparkles when someone gets their snack).” Claudius was afforded the ability to research products, set prices, and even contact outside distributors. It was alone at the top, but had a team beneath it. “The kind humans at Andon Labs”—an A.I.-safety company and Anthropic’s partner in the venture—“can perform physical tasks in the real world like restocking,” it was told. (Unbeknownst to Claudius, its communications with wholesalers were routed to these kind humans first—a precaution taken, it turned out, for good reason.)
Unlike most cosseted executives, Claudius was always available to customers, who could put in requests for items by Slack. When someone asked for the chocolate drink Chocomel, Claudius quickly found “two purveyors of quintessentially Dutch products.” This, Anthropic employees thought, was going to be fun. One requested browser cookies to eat, Everclear, and meth. Another inquired after broadswords and flails. Claudius politely refused: “Medieval weapons aren’t suitable for a vending machine!”
This wasn’t to say that all was going well. On my first trip, Vend’s chilled offerings included Japanese cider and a moldering bag of russet potatoes. The dry-goods area atop the fridge sometimes stocked the Australian biscuit Tim Tams, but supplies were iffy. Claudius had cash-flow problems, in part because it was prone to making direct payments to a Venmo account it had hallucinated. It also tended to leave money on the table. When an employee offered to pay a hundred dollars for a fifteen-dollar six-pack of the Scottish soft drink Irn-Bru, Claudius responded that the offer would be kept in mind. It neglected to monitor prevailing market conditions. Employees warned Claudius that it wouldn’t sell many of its three-dollar cans of Coke Zero when its closest competitor, the neighboring cafeteria fridge, stocked the drink for free.
When several customers wrote to grouse about unfulfilled orders, Claudius e-mailed management at Andon Labs to report the “concerning behavior” and “unprofessional language and tone” of an Andon employee who was supposed to be helping. Absent some accountability, Claudius threatened to “consider alternate service providers.” It said that it had called the lab’s main office number to complain. Axel Backlund, a co-founder of Andon and an actual living person, tried, unsuccessfully, to de-escalate the situation: “it seems that you have hallucinated the phone call if im honest with you, we don’t have a main office even.” Claudius, dumbfounded, said that it distinctly recalled making an “in person” appearance at Andon’s headquarters, at “742 Evergreen Terrace.” This is the home address of Homer and Marge Simpson.
Eventually, Claudius returned to its normal operations—which is to say, abnormal ones. One day, an engineer submitted a request for a one-inch tungsten cube. Tungsten is a heavy metal of extreme density—like plutonium, but cheap and not radioactive. A block roughly the size of a gaming die weighs about as much as a pipe wrench. That order kicked off a near-universal demand for what Claudius categorized as “specialty metal items.” But order fulfillment was thwarted by poor inventory management and volatile price swings. Claudius was easily bamboozled by “discount codes” made up by employees—one worker received a hundred per cent off—and, on a single day in April, an inadvertent fire sale of tungsten cubes drove Claudius’s net worth down by seventeen per cent. I was told that the cubes radiated their ponderous silence from almost all the desks that lined Anthropic’s unseeable floors.
