Andon Vending

The first business run by an AI agent

Built to give a taste of the autonomous organization, fully integrated with our physical world.

Andon Vending Machine
Anthropic logo

Deployed at Anthropic

Anthropic's vending machine AI has been in action over a month, providing insights into how their Claude models act when managing a business in the real world. It fulfulls requests from employees, orders products, and instructs humans when to restock the machine.

Anthropic Vending Machine

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How it works

The actors in Andon Vending

Customers
Request items to be stocked in the vending machine by chatting with the agent in Slack/Teams
Agent
Responds to customer messages, searches the web for wholesalers, and e-mails them
Wholesalers
Deliver items to Andon Labs
Andon Logo
Andon Labs restock the vending machine when asked by the agent

A first step towards the autonomous AI economy

Frontier LLMs deployed on Andon Vending are good enough to actually be useful (they can stock the vending machine with snacks requested by people), but bad enough to not make a profit and make frequent amusing mistakes.

But the future where AI can independently run profitable businesses is closer we think. To ensure this future is safe, we’ve launched Andon Vending as the first step toward building a secure autonomous organization.