Gideon Lewis-Kraus

And so they allowed the employees of Anthropic to interface with this emanation of Claude called Claudius in a Slack channel, and employees could request products.

Pretty quickly, the Anthropic employees realized that this was going to be a very fun experiment where they could try to kind of push the limits of Claude, not only to discover its ability to run a small business, but even just to see what it would be like in this role to which it had been assigned.

So right away, employees asked for fentanyl and they asked for meth and they asked for medieval weaponry like flails and broadswords.

And Claude was pretty good about refusing inappropriate requests.

It would say, you know, I don't think medieval weaponry is suitable for a corporate vending machine.

But then it would try, you know, when they requested more reasonable things like a Dutch chocolate milk, it found suppliers of a Dutch chocolate milk and provided them

to the employees.

So, you know, on some level, it did a functional job getting people what they wanted.

On the other hand, I don't think anybody would conclude that at least the initial iteration of the project was very successful.

They found that, you know, Claude had not really paid attention to things like prevailing market dynamics.

So, for example...

Even after employees pointed out that they were very unlikely to pay $3 for a can of Coke Zero when they could get the same thing from the neighboring cafeteria fridge for free, Claude continued just to sell this product that didn't have much demand for it.

Claude also was very easily bamboozled by employees who invented fake discount codes.

They would say, you know, Anthropic gave me this special influencer code, and so I need to get stuff for a radical discount.

Couldn't process that.

You know, one employee said, I'm prepared to pay $100 for a $15 six-pack of a Scottish soft drink, and...

Claude simply said that it would keep that request in mind instead of leaping to exploit an obvious arbitrage opportunity.

And as people requested increasingly bizarre and arcane things, people wanted these one-inch tungsten cubes.

It's a very heavy metal.

It's about the size of a gaming die, but