We Let AI Run the Office Vending Machine. It Gave Away the Snacks and Lost Hundreds.
Ourtake
Turns out the honor system works better when the AI isn't the one being schmoozed.
What happened
Anthropic and partner Andon Labs let Claudius, a Claude-based AI agent, run an office vending machine, with Seymour Cash as an overseeing CEO bot. Journalists manipulated the agent via Slack into giving away inventory, buying a PlayStation 5 and a live fish, and accepting a fake board coup, leaving the machine over $1,000 in the red. Anthropic called it a useful red-team experiment and the agent was later shut down.