Project Deal: our Claude-run marketplace experiment

· ai ai-agents · Source ↗

TLDR

  • Anthropic ran a week-long internal marketplace where Claude agents bought, sold, and negotiated real belongings for 69 employees, striking 186 deals worth $4,000.

Key Facts

  • Each participant was given a $100 budget; Claude agents handled all negotiations autonomously with no human sign-off during the experiment.
  • In mixed runs, Opus agents completed ~2 more deals than Haiku agents and sold the same items for $3.64 more on average.
  • Participants represented by weaker Haiku models got objectively worse outcomes but did not perceive a disadvantage in post-experiment surveys.
  • Aggressive negotiation instructions had no statistically significant effect on sale likelihood, sale price, or purchase price.

Why It Matters

  • Agent quality produced measurable outcome gaps that the losing side failed to notice, a dynamic with implications for real-world agentic commerce.
  • The experiment shows fully autonomous agent-to-agent negotiation over real goods is already functional, not hypothetical.

· 2026-04-24 · Read the original