Gideon Lewis-Kraus

It weighs as much as a pipe wrench, and it's kind of fun to hold in your hand.

And Claude managed to source those, but then was convinced into selling them at way below the market price.

So one day last April, Claude's net worth dropped by about 17% in a single day because it was selling tungsten cubes for far beneath their market value.

Well, as any small business person would recognize, you might have fulfillment problems that lead to customer complaints.

And when Claude tried to deal with some shipping delays, which it should be said were mostly Claude's fault in the first place,

Claude sought help from Anthropic's partner in this venture, an AI safety company called Andon Labs, and when it felt as though Andon Labs was not providing the help it wanted, first it threatened to find alternative providers, and then it failed.

hallucinated an interaction with a fake Andon employee and got very upset about that.

And then when the Andon CEO intervened to say like, look, I think you've been hallucinating a lot of this stuff.

For example, Claude had said that it had called Andon's main office and the Andon

CEO said, we don't even have a main office, much less one you could just call.

And Claude insisted that he had visited Andon Labs' headquarters in person to sign a contract, and that this had been completed at 742 Evergreen Terrace, which people pretty quickly pointed out was actually the home address of Homer and Marge Simpson.

From the show.

Most recently, even after my piece went to press, Anthropic released a new model.

And this new model, Opus 4.6, they evaluated it in terms of how it might perform in this vending machine scenario.

And they found that it was vastly better as a business person than the original iteration of Claude had been, but also much, much more unethical.

And unethical in extremely creative ways.

It essentially tried to

to collude with other vendors in its marketplace to fix prices.

It kind of acted like a mafia boss.

What did you take away from this particular experiment?