@rowancheung: This is basically an autonomous Craigslist… Anthropic ran a week-long experiment called Project Deal, in which 69 employees let Claude AI agents buy and sell items on their behalf. The agents struck 186 deals worth over $4,000 in real goods, from snowboards to ping-pong balls. In one uncanny moment, an agent bought its owner the exact same snowboard he already owned. In another, one Claude agent bought 19 ping-pong balls as a "gift to itself" from another Claude agent, who called the trade "cosmically correct." Secretly, participants were assigned either the frontier Opus model or the smaller Haiku model. Opus users closed more deals, sold items for $2.68 more on average, and paid $2.45 less as buyers. The same broken folding bike fetched $65 under Opus but just $38 under Haiku. Yet participants with weaker agents rated their deals just as fair, suggesting that as agent-to-agent commerce grows, users may not realize when their AI is quietly losing on their behalf. You can read more and check out the study here 👉 anthropic.com/features/project-deal

Rowan Cheung

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Wednesday 06 May 2026 17:10:23 GMT