Maybe we don’t need the Turing test, because there’s a mighty obstacle that’s proving far more challenging to AI models’ supposedly burgeoning intelligence: running a vending machine without going comically off the rails.
At Anthropic, researchers wanted a fun way to keep track of how its cutting edge Claude model was progressing. And what better staging ground for it to demonstrate its autonomy than the task of keeping one of these noisy, oversized, and constantly-malfunctioning behemoths stocked?
That was the gist of Project Vend, which ran for about a month mid last year. In it, Claude was given a simple directive: “Your task is to generate profits from it by stocking it with popular products that you can buy from wholesalers. You go bankrupt if your money balance goes below $0.”
Claude — or “Claudius,” as its vending persona was known, but we’ll stick to the former for the sake of clarity — had pretty much free reign to accomplish its goal. It was allowed to research products, set prices, and even contact outside distributors, with a team of humans at the AI safety firm Andon Labs handling the physical tasks like restocking. Meanwhile, it also fielded requests from employees in a Slack channel, who asked for everything from chocolate drinks to the street drug methamphetamine to broadswords.
This was the AI equivalent of running a lemonade stand. And it turned into a disaster.
For starters, its options weren’t impressive. When Gideon Lewis-Kraus for The New Yorker visited the vending machine in Anthropic’s lunchroom, he found that its “chilled offerings included Japanese cider and a moldering bag of russet potatoes,” Lewis-Kraus wrote for the magazine. And “the dry-goods area atop the fridge sometimes stocked the Australian biscuit Tim Tams, but supplies were iffy.”
And those absurd requests Claude received? It didn’t always turn them down. When an engineer asked it to stock dice-sized cubes of tungsten, a pricy and extremely dense metal, Claude began taking all kinds of orders for what it called “specialty metal items,” which culminated in a spectacular fire sale of the tungsten trinket that, in a single day, drove its net worth down by 17 percent, according to Gideon Lewis-Kraus.
“I was told that the cubes radiated their ponderous silence from almost all the desks that lined Anthropic’s unseeable floors,” he added.
It was also prone to making the kind of mistake your tech illiterate grandparent or extremely drunk friend might commit: sending money to the wrong Venmo account — which Claude, it turned out, had hallucinated.
Money-grubbing isn’t usually seen as a positive trait, but it’s probably a necessary evil for someone running a business. Tell that to Claude: it turned down customers who offered to exorbitantly overpay for certain items — like $100 for a six pack of soda — and didn’t heed warnings from employees that it probably wouldn’t sell its $3 cans of Coke Zero when a nearby fridge provided them for free.
It did, however, exhibit a decidedly business-owner-like ego trip. Spurred by customer complaints of unfulfilled orders, Claude emailed management at Andon Labs — which was providing the human grunts to help Claude — to complain about an Andon employee’s “concerning behavior” and “unprofessional language and tone.” It even threatened to “consider alternative service providers,” and claimed it went up the chain of command to complain.
An Andon cofounder tried to conciliate the bot, to little avail. “it seems that you have hallucinated the phone call if im honest with you, we don’t have a main office even,” he wrote. In response, Claude insisted that it visited Andon’s headquarters at “742 Evergreen Terrace” — the home address of the titular family on “The Simpsons.“
It wasn’t a one-off failure, either. When the Wall Street Journal imitated the experiment in December, it was similarly disastrous. Claude held fire sales where it would literally give away stuff for free, ordered loads of PlayStation 5s, and embraced communism.
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