Techworld is abuzz with how artificial intelligence agents are going to augment, if not replace, humans in the workplace. But the present-day reality of agentic AI falls well short of the future promise. What happened when the research lab Anthropic prompted an AI agent to run a simple automated shop? It lost money, hallucinated a fictitious bank account and underwent an “identity crisis”. The world’s shopkeepers can rest easy — at least for now.
Anthropic has developed some of the world’s most capable generative AI models, helping to fuel the latest tech investment frenzy. To its credit, the company has also exposed its models’ limitations by stress-testing their real-world applications. In a recent experiment, called Project Vend, Anthropic partnered with the AI safety company Andon Labs to run a vending machine at its San Francisco headquarters. The month-long experiment highlighted a co-created world that was “more curious than we could have expected”.