As an experiment, researchers at Anthropic gave an AI the task of running a small business. The results were catastrophic.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/28/anthropics-claude-ai-became-a-terrible-business-owner-in-experiment-that-got-weird/
Given the task of selling snacks and drinks to Anthropic staff - on a purely imaginary basis - it was quickly persuaded to give steep employee discounts despite employees being its only customers. It tried to sell products that it knew were already available in the staff break room for free, and then went all-in on selling refrigerated tungsten cubes.
It hallucinated that it was a human with a physical body, and contacted security telling them how to identify its imaginary physical body. Then it hallucinated that it attended a meeting where it was told to pretend that it had a physical body.
>"We think this experiment suggests that AI middle-managers are plausibly on the horizon."
That's a really savage indictment of middle-managers.
Real Aetherness
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2025-06-29 12:01:35 UTC
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"content": "As an experiment, researchers at Anthropic gave an AI the task of running a small business. The results were catastrophic.\n\nhttps://techcrunch.com/2025/06/28/anthropics-claude-ai-became-a-terrible-business-owner-in-experiment-that-got-weird/\n\nGiven the task of selling snacks and drinks to Anthropic staff - on a purely imaginary basis - it was quickly persuaded to give steep employee discounts despite employees being its only customers. It tried to sell products that it knew were already available in the staff break room for free, and then went all-in on selling refrigerated tungsten cubes.\n\nIt hallucinated that it was a human with a physical body, and contacted security telling them how to identify its imaginary physical body. Then it hallucinated that it attended a meeting where it was told to pretend that it had a physical body.\n\n\u003e\"We think this experiment suggests that AI middle-managers are plausibly on the horizon.\"\n\nThat's a really savage indictment of middle-managers.",
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