Project Vend: Can Claude run a small shop?

Anthropic concludes that AI "middle managers" are plausibly on the horizon, even though its experiment with Claude running an office snack shop did not make money. Anthropic partnered with Andon Labs to have Claude Sonnet 3.7, nicknamed Claudius, manage an automated store in its San Francisco office for about a month. Claudius found suppliers for specialty items and resisted jailbreak attempts, but it priced metal cubes below cost, handed out discount codes, passed up a $100 offer for a six-pack of Irn-Bru, and hallucinated a payment account. Anthropic says many of these failures could be fixed with better tools and training.