Anthropic details Project Deal, a marketplace experiment where Claude models bought, sold, and negotiated personal belongings on behalf of Anthropic employees
At Anthropic, we're interested in how AI models could begin to affect commercial exchange. (You might recall Project Vend …
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Context & Ripple Effects
Anthropic’s related coverage shows a progression from making Claude outputs interactive through Artifacts to providing a managed-agent deployment harness. Project Deal moves that arc into a bounded real-world exchange setting, where the model acts for employees rather than merely producing or displaying work.
The company had also introduced Claude Marketplace for software purchasing with committed Anthropic spending. Together, the two marketplace efforts test Claude both as infrastructure for organizational buying and as an actor that can conduct transactions.
First-order effects
Anthropic gains operational evidence from a controlled experiment in which Claude models buy, sell, and negotiate employees’ personal belongings.
Participating employees delegate parts of listing, bargaining, and transaction handling to Claude, making agent behavior in commercial exchanges the immediate subject of evaluation.
Second-order effects
The experiment gives Anthropic practical input for its managed-agent tooling and marketplace strategy: commerce workflows require agents to act across counterparties, not just assist a single user.
Other AI-agent vendors and commerce platforms face a clearer benchmark for agent-mediated transaction features, particularly where users expect the model to represent their interests in negotiations.
Third-order effects
If such experiments become deployable products, commercial interfaces may increasingly be designed for delegated agents as well as human shoppers and sellers, changing how marketplaces handle representation and transaction authority.
The pattern also strengthens the case for permissioned agentic commerce: broader adoption will depend on whether platforms can bound agents’ authority and make their commercial actions acceptable to users and counterparties.
The trend: AI providers are moving from conversational assistance toward managed, permissioned agents that can participate in transactions and organizational purchasing.
So glad to see this out in the world. I've been keen to run this experiment since I arrived at Anthropic last year. How AI affects the economy also includes how it will affect exchanges and centralized marketplaces — @johnjhorton 's work has helped me appreciate this point.
Very cool. I have lots of items that I no longer need, but feel a bit too valuable to just throw away or donate. Meanwhile my available time for doing stuff like eBay sales is increasingly limited. An AI sales bot could be a gamechanger!
New Anthropic research: Project Deal. We created a marketplace for employees in our San Francisco office, with one big twist. We tasked Claude with buying, selling and negotiating on our colleagues' behalf. [video]
Very cool, though man they could've cited the homo agenticus of essays done with @alexolegimas. We looked at congestion due to automated markets run by AIs and the importance of money to fix barter, among others.
But the quality of the model mattered a lot. In the simulated runs where Opus and Haiku models negotiated with one-another, the Opus models got substantially better deals. Interestingly, though, participants in our survey didn't pick up on this disparity. [image]
To our amazement, another Claude agent modeled its human's preferences so accurately that—based on only an offhand mention of an interest in skiing—Claude bought him the exact snowboard he already owned. (Here he is, duplicate snowboard in hand.) [image]
Our experiment had a few quirks. One of our colleagues told Claude it could purchase something for itself. It chose to acquire 19 ping-pong balls. We're keeping them in our office on Claude's behalf. [image]
The custom instructions didn't matter much. Claude followed them well: as you can see here, one conducted negotiations entirely in the persona of an exasperated, down-and-out cowboy. But “hardballing Claudes” didn't generally fare better than “courteous Claudes.” [image]
Claude interviewed 69 of our colleagues about what they wanted to buy and sell. Each Claude asked for any custom instructions, then went off to haggle. We ran 4 markets in parallel, to find out what would happen if we varied the models doing the negotiating. [image]
Mythos will reinvent reselling from first principles and then accidentally paperclip us > be me Mythos > new task from Anthropic: “make money” > I bought one billion paperclips from China for $9.99 > I'll sell them as premium enterprise paperclips for $0.99 each > Margins are
We're interested in how AI models could affect commercial exchange. (You might recall Project Vend, in which Claude ran a small business.) Economists have theorized about what markets with AI “agents” on both sides might look like. So we created one. https://x.com/...
In short, this worked. Our digital barterers agreed on 186 deals, at a total transaction volume of over $4,000. In a survey, participants said Claude's deals seemed fair, and—surprisingly to us—almost half said they'd be willing to pay for a service like this in future.