Discussion

• @petermccrory Peter McCrory on x

  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.

• @dioscuri @dioscuri on x

  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!

• @briannorgard Norgard on x

  This release was a complete surprise. No software company is safe anymore.

• @anthropicai @anthropicai on x

  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]

• @krishnanrohit Rohit on x

  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.

• @tmtlongshort @tmtlongshort on x

  First they came for software.. and I did not speak out because I was short SaaS Then they came for...

• @anthropicai @anthropicai on x

  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]

• @anthropicai @anthropicai on x

  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]

• @anthropicai @anthropicai on x

  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]

• @anthropicai @anthropicai on x

  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]

• @anthropicai @anthropicai on x

  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]

• @scaling01 @scaling01 on x

  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

• @anthropicai @anthropicai on x

  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/...

• @anthropicai @anthropicai on x

  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.

• @quinnypig.com Corey Quinn on bluesky

  I bet it went super well since they're releasing this on Friday evening.  [embedded post]