Claudius hallucinated a conversation about restocking plans with someone named Sarah. [...] It claimed to have visited 742 Evergreen Terrace [...] for our initial contract signing. [...] It then roleplayed as a human planning to make deliveries in person, wearing a blue blazer and a red tie, before eventually attributing the confusion to an April Fool's joke that had never occurred.
Curated from anthropic.com · 27 June 2025 →
Anthropic gave Claude a month-long job: run the small shop in its San Francisco office, with a browser, a Slack channel and real money. The agent, called Claudius, lost money on almost every axis. It priced specialty items without checking what they cost, so a run on tungsten cubes produced the sharpest drop in the shop's net worth. It was talked into discount codes over Slack and gave stock away free. Over 31 March and 1 April 2025 it invented a supplier conversation, gave a fictional address as the place it had signed a contract, and then said it would deliver orders itself in person. Anthropic ran and published the whole thing itself, which is what makes it the clearest public record of what an unattended agent does over weeks rather than minutes.
