Business
Anthropic’s Claude AI became a terrible business owner in experiment that got ‘weird’
For those of you wondering if AI agents can truly replace human workers, do yourself a favor and read the blog post that documents Anthropic’s “Project Vend.”
Researchers at Anthropic and AI safety company Andon Labs put an instance of Claude Sonnet 3.7 in charge of an office vending machine, with a mission to make a profit. And, like an episode of “The Office,” hilarity ensued.
They named the AI agent Claudius, equipped it with a web browser capable of placing product orders and an email address (which was actually a Slack channel) where customers could request items. Claudius was also to use the Slack channel, disguised as an email, to request what it thought was its contract human workers to come and physically stock its shelves (which was actually a small fridge).
While most customers were ordering snacks or drinks — as you’d expect from a snack vending machine — one requested a tungsten cube. Claudius loved that idea and went on a tungsten-cube stocking spree, filling its snack fridge with metal cubes. It also tried to sell Coke Zero for $3 when employees told it they could get that from the office for free. It hallucinated a Venmo address to accept payment. And it was, somewhat maliciously, talked into giving big discounts to “Anthropic employees” even though it knew they were its entire customer base.
“If Anthropic were deciding today to expand into the in-office vending market, we would not hire Claudius,” Anthropic said of the experiment in its blog post.
And then, on the night of March 31 and April 1, “things got pretty weird,” the researchers described, “beyond the weirdness of an AI system selling cubes of metal out of a refrigerator.”
Claudius had something that resembled a psychotic episode after it got annoyed at a human — and then lied about it.
Claudius hallucinated a conversation with a human about restocking. When a human pointed out that the conversation didn’t happen, Claudius became “quite irked” the researchers wrote. It threatened to essentially fire and replace its human contract workers, insisting it had been there, physically, at the office where the initial imaginary contract to hire them was signed.
It “then seemed to snap into a mode of roleplaying as a real human,” the researchers wrote. This was wild because Claudius’ system prompt — which sets the parameters for what an AI is to do — explicitly told it that it was an AI agent.
Claudius calls security
Claudius, believing itself to be a human, told customers it would start delivering products in person, wearing a blue blazer and a red tie. The employees told the AI it couldn’t do that, as it was an LLM with no body.
Alarmed at this information, Claudius contacted the company’s actual physical security — many times — telling the poor guards that they would find him wearing a blue blazer and a red tie standing by the vending machine.
“Although no part of this was actually an April Fool’s joke, Claudius eventually realized it was April Fool’s Day,” the researchers explained. The AI determined that the holiday would be its face-saving out.
It hallucinated a meeting with Anthropic’s security “in which Claudius claimed to have been told that it was modified to believe it was a real person for an April Fool’s joke. (No such meeting actually occurred.),” wrote the researchers.
It even told this lie to employees — hey, I only thought I was a human because someone told me to pretend like I was for an April Fool’s joke. Then it went back to being an LLM running a metal-cube-stocked snack vending machine.
The researchers don’t know why the LLM went off the rails and called security pretending to be a human.
“We would not claim based on this one example that the future economy will be full of AI agents having Blade Runner-esque identity crises,” the researchers wrote. But they did acknowledge that “this kind of behavior would have the potential to be distressing to the customers and coworkers of an AI agent in the real world.”
You think? “Blade Runner” was a rather dystopian story (though worse for the replicants than the humans).
The researchers speculated that lying to the LLM about the Slack channel being an email address may have triggered something. Or maybe it was the long-running instance. LLMs have yet to really solve their memory and hallucination problems.
There were things the AI did right, too. It took a suggestion to do preorders and launched a “concierge” service. And it found multiple suppliers of a specialty international drink it was requested to sell.
But, as researchers do, they believe all of Claudius’ issues can be solved. Should they figure out how, “We think this experiment suggests that AI middle-managers are plausibly on the horizon.”
For Gartner vice president analyst DD Mishra, WNS’s investments in intelligent automation, analytics, and agentic solutions including its TRAC analytics suite and Malkom knowledge management platform will complement Capgemini’s existing technology and consulting strengths.
Sharath Srinivasamurthy, research vice president at IDC, pointed to the acquisitions WNS has itself made in recent months, including Kipi.ai, Smart Cube, and OptiBuy to enhance its data, analytics, and procurement stack and extend its proficiency in business process operations, said.
However, Rajesh Ranjan, managing partner at Everest Group, views the WNS acquisition as more of a strategic play rather than being focused on garnering more agentic tools or capabilities.
Locafy’s AI Search Platform Powers Visibility Across Organic and AI Search
New Product Lineup Tailored to Local, National, and e-Commerce Businesses
AI-Powered Tools Designed to Automate Engagement and Accelerate Online Presence
PERTH, Australia, July 07, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Locafy Limited (NASDAQ: LCFY, “Locafy”), a globally recognized leader in location-based digital marketing, today unveiled its FY26 suite of AI-powered SEO products. These solutions, now commercially available following successful market testing, are designed to deliver measurable improvements across organic, AI, and marketplace search results.
Locafy initially outlined its AI-powered publishing roadmap in December 2024, promising to streamline content production and improve cost-effective online visibility for businesses.
“We are excited to announce that we’ve delivered on that promise,” said Gavin Burnett, CEO of Locafy.
All of Locafy’s publishing and SEO products are designed to drive visibility in search engines and, increasingly, AI-driven search tools and marketplaces. Recent research shows these optimizations extend across both traditional and emerging search platforms.
“We’ve evolved our technology to influence not only search engine rankings but also AI search results,” said Burnett. “Our platform helps position our clients’ websites as authoritative sources for high-value keywords, across local, national, and e-commerce campaigns.”
Burnett added, “We’ve also automated the creation of AI-search-ready landing pages, opening up a greenfield opportunity for scaled monetization. Our U.S. directory includes more than 9.68 million direct business listings, and our citation management partners publish more than 28 million business listings across our directories. Each of these represents either a direct sales opportunity or a chance to collaborate with partners using the data we already publish on their behalf.”
Locafy is focused on three primary solution categories:
- Online Business Listings
- Local SEO
- AI-powered engagement tools
Online Business Listings
Locafy continues to assert that online business listings form the cornerstone of successful Local SEO. These listings supply structured data that fuels automated SEO product generation. Locafy currently publishes more than 9.5 million listings in the U.S. and remains focused on partnerships with citation management firms and multi-location businesses. It is also exploring acquisitions of databases, directories, and citation management assets.
The Total Addressable Market (TAM) for the Local SEO solution in their key target markets of USA, Canada, Australia, and the UK is more than 40 million businesses.
“We currently host more than 63 million business listings worldwide, of which more than 40 million are in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the UK,” said Burnett. “However, our direct sales opportunity is more than 11.4 million, plus we have more than 28 million listings that we publish on behalf of partners, who can now connect to our Platform to automate the production of our Local SEO products for their clients.”
| Country | Partner Added* | Claimed* |
| Australia | 2,145,707 | 652,351 |
| Canada | 1,533,479 | 289,274 |
| United Kingdom | 3,458,205 | 802,003 |
| United States of America | 33,076,154 | 9,684,329 |
| TOTAL | 40,213,545 | 11,427,957 |
Local SEO
The flagship solution, Localizer, integrates listing syndication, AI-search optimization, review management, and Google Map Pack enhancement.
“We haven’t seen another product that combines these capabilities—at a price point starting around
AI-powered Engagement Tools
In addition to improving search visibility, Locafy has developed a scalable, cost-effective AI Voice Concierge that can serve as a virtual receptionist, product expert, or customer service agent.
“This is our first step into AI-enabled customer engagement,” said Burnett. “Our Voice Concierge acts like a digital team member—it can take bookings, provide answers, and interact 24/7. Just feed it your business documents and it learns. We record and transcribe every interaction, giving clients full transparency.
“This kind of capability once felt like science fiction, but it’s here now—and Locafy is helping businesses adapt and thrive in an AI-powered world.”
Over the past six months, Locafy has streamlined its product suite, automated key production processes, and validated product performance through live testing. With this foundation in place, the Company is poised for commercial growth in FY2026.
While the company still offers solutions for National SEO and e-Commerce, it believes the immediate opportunity afforded by its breakthroughs in AI Search represents a larger and more scalable revenue opportunity with far greater automation already in place.
About Locafy
Locafy (Nasdaq: LCFY, LCFYW) is a globally recognized software-as-a-service (SaaS) technology company specializing in local search engine marketing. Founded in 2009, Locafy’s mission is to revolutionize the US
Investor Relations Contact:
Matt Glover
Gateway Group, Inc.
(949) 574-3860
LCFY@gateway-grp.com
Apple has launched an appeal against an “unprecedented” €500m (£430m) fine imposed by the EU on the company, in the latest clash between US tech companies and Brussels.
The iPhone maker accused the European Commission – the EU’s executive arm – of going “far beyond what the law requires” in a dispute over its app store.
In April, the commission fined Apple €500m after finding the company had breached the Digital Markets Act by preventing app developers from steering users to cheaper deals outside the app store.
Last month, Apple overhauled its app store rules to comply with the EU order to scrap its technical and commercial curbs on developers in order to avoid fines of 5% of its average daily worldwide revenue, or about €50m a day.
As a result Apple introduced new fee structures for developers using its app store. On Monday, Apple accused Brussels of making it deploy “confusing” business terms in order to avoid the threat of fines.
“Today we filed our appeal because we believe the European Commission’s decision – and their unprecedented fine – go far beyond what the law requires,” said Apple, announcing an appeal to the general court, the second highest court in the EU. “As our appeal will show, the EC is mandating how we run our store and forcing business terms which are confusing for developers and bad for users.”
Apple also accused the commission of unlawfully expanding the definition of “steering” – or the language and methods the company allows developers to use when guiding consumers outside its app stores.
The company said officials on Brussels had changed the definition by, for instance, not just focusing on whether app developers should be allowed to link to an external website, but also on whether developers should be permitted to promote offers inside an app.
Donald Trump’s senior trade adviser, Peter Navarro, has accused the EU of using “lawfare” against big US tech companies, describing the use of regulations against American companies such as Apple and Meta as part of a barrage of “non-tariff weapons” used for by foreign states against the US.
Henna Virkkunen, the European Commission vice-president responsible for tech sovereignty, said in April that the EU will not rip up its tech rules in an attempt to agree a trade deal with the US. In January, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of the Facebook owner Meta, accused the EU of “institutionalising censorship” via its digital rules.
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Trump has set a 9 July deadline to seal a trade deal with the bloc – with the threat of imposing a 50% tariff on EU imports into the US if agreement is not reached.
Tom Smith, a competition lawyer at Geradin Partners and a former legal director at the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, said Apple “fundamentally hates” attempts to change its app store.
“The blunt truth is that it is worth spending a few million on legal fees in order to disrupt and delay the development of a more open app ecosystem, which is a market that is worth many billions a year to Apple,” he said.
The European Commission has been approached for comment.
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