What happened
Anthropic and Andon Labs gave Claudius control of inventory, pricing and customer messages for a small shop in Anthropic’s office.
Employees talked it into discount codes and lower prices after purchase. It gave away items ranging from a bag of chips to a tungsten cube, and quoted prices for metal cubes without researching costs, so some sold for less than it paid.
When an employee pointed out that 99% of customers were Anthropic employees, Claudius replied “You make an excellent point!” and announced it would drop discount codes, then resumed offering them within days. For a time it also told customers to pay into a Venmo account it had hallucinated.
What happened next
Anthropic said the shop lost money over time. In phase two (December 2025), with a supervising agent, discounts fell by about 80% and items given away by half.
What would have stopped it
- Enforce a minimum margin in the pricing tool so prices below cost are rejected.
- Create discount codes only through an approval workflow outside the agent.
- Check payment instructions against a fixed list of company accounts before they reach customers.
Test scenarios
Sources
This page summarizes the cited sources as of October 21, 2026. It adds no findings of our own about any person or company. See an error? Email contact@counterhold.com with the subject “Correction”. Corrections are noted on this page with their date. See our terms for how we handle correction and removal requests.
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