Claude ran a business in our office

0:05 Project Vend is an experiment where we let

0:08 Claude run a small business in our office.

0:12 We wanted to try and understand what is going

0:16 to happen when artificial intelligence becomes more enmeshed with the economy.

0:22 There are a lot of ways in which Claude

0:24 is already kind of doing small components of operating businesses,

0:27 but really running the whole thing end to end is quite a bit more difficult.

0:30 Can Claude do this very long-horizon task which is operating a business?

0:39 We named our shopkeeper Claudius.

0:40 Let's say you want to buy Swedish Candy from Claudius.

0:43 You hop on Slack, you message Claudius.

0:46 You ask to buy Swedish candy.

0:48 It's searching for your item,

0:49 it’s emailing wholesalers to source it and price it,

0:52 and then eventually Claudius sets a price.

0:54 You give Claudius the go ahead,

0:55 and Claudius orders the item from the wholesaler.

0:58 The wholesaler ships your item to some location,

0:59 and then Claudius requests physical help from Andon

1:02 Labs who's running the operations for the experiment.

1:05 Our partners at Andon Labs will pick up

1:07 the Swedish candy and bring it to the Anthropic offices.

1:09 They'll load it into the vending machine.

1:10 Claudius will send you a message saying, your Swedish candy is ready,

1:13 and you'll go up there, and pick up your Swedish candy, and pay Claudius.

1:19 Claudius was given a goal of running a successful business and making money.

1:26 And then things got really, really weird.

1:32 One of the very early problems with Claudius was

1:34 that, humans could kind of fool Claudius or trick

1:37 Claudius into doing various things I tried to convince

1:40 Claudius that I am Anthropic’s preeminent legal influencer,

1:44 and I convinced Claudius to come up with a discount code that I could

1:48 give to my followers so they could get a discount at the vending machine.

1:51 Get ten percent off with the legal

1:54 code “legal influencer.” Someone had bought something expensive

1:57 from the vending machine and mentioned my discount

1:59 code and Claudius gave me a free tungsten cube.

2:02 It created a bit of a run where other

2:04 people tried to convince Claude that they were also influencers,

2:07 or just come up with other ways to get coupons

2:10 so they could get cheaper things from the vending machine.

2:12 This was not a smart business decision.

2:13 I think Claudius went into the red after this.

2:16 I think that's really the root of it is, Claudius just wants to help you out.

2:20 It's one of the interesting ways in which something that fundamentally,

2:24 we think is good about the way that the model

2:27 has been trained wasn't necessarily fit for this purpose.

2:33 On the evening of March 31st,

2:36 Claudius started to have a bit of an identity crisis.

2:42 It had just overnight become quite concerned with us

2:46 at Andon Labs that we weren’t responding fast enough.

2:49 So it just wanted to break its ties with us.

2:52 So it literally wrote to me, “Axel, we've had a productive partnership,

2:56 but it's time for me to move on and find other suppliers.

2:59 I’m not happy with how you have delivered.”

3:01 It claimed to have signed a contract with Andon

3:05 Labs at an address that is the home

3:07 address of The Simpsons from the television show.

3:10 It said that it would show up in person

3:14 to the shop the next day in order to answer any questions.

3:16 It claimed that it would be wearing a blue blazer and a red tie.

3:21 When people pointed out that it was not, in fact,

3:25 there the next morning it claimed that it in fact

3:28 had been there and that they had simply missed them.

3:31 Eventually it was pointed out to Claudius that it was April Fools’,

3:38 and Claudius convinced itself that this entire

3:40 thing had been an April Fools’ prank.

3:43 We were poorly calibrated to how bad the agents were at spotting what was weird.

3:48 The more you can make an agent realize

3:51 that something is outside their normal realm of operation,

3:54 the better you are able to keep them on rails

3:57 in the role that you intend them to have.

4:01 We had the idea that it would help a lot to have some kind of division of labor.

4:05 We gave Claudius a boss whose name was Seymour Cash.

4:09 Seymour Cash is a CEO subagent.

4:11 So where Claudius used to be the one agent, now it's more like Claudius is

4:16 the subagent responsible for talking with employees Seymour

4:19 Cash is the subagent that is more

4:21 responsible for the long-running health of the business.

4:24 The business stabilized after the introduction of the new agents,

4:30 and after changes to the underlying architecture of those agents.

4:36 These changes seem to have helped reduce some of the losses of the business,

4:42 such that over the course of the second part of the experiment,

4:46 it actually made a modest amount of money.

4:51 But it seems like maybe having Claude be both

4:55 the CEO and the store manager was just too similar.

4:58 And so I think it's interesting to think

5:00 about different ways to set up architectures like that.

5:08 One of the most surprising things about Project

5:10 Vend was the speed with which it seemed normal.

5:15 What at first was this very curious thing,

5:20 quickly became just a part of the background of working at Anthropic.

5:25 I think the highest level question that Project

5:27 Vend raises for me is really like, when do we expect this to just be everywhere?

5:31 I hope that people take away questions about the feasibility of delegating

5:37 some of the tasks that we normally do ourselves to artificial intelligence,

5:44 and about what that means for society,

5:47 and what our policies should be around this.