Anthropic Ran Strange AI Marketplace With Agents Buying And Selling With Real Money: Report

Anthropic ran a strange week-long test, created a marketplace, where AI agents did everything, such as negotiating, haggling and deal-making for real goods and real money, TechCrunch reported. The experiment, called "Project Deal", offers an early glimpse of "agent-to-agent commerce". It shows what would happen when AI drives the marketplace.

As per the report, Anthropic set up a private, Slack-based classifieds marketplace for 69 employees at its San Francisco office in December 2025. Each participant got a $100 budget paid out via gift cards to buy items from coworkers.

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Before trading began, Claude conducted a short interview with each volunteer to learn what they wanted to sell, their price, what they wanted to buy and how their AI agent should negotiate. Anthropic then turned those answers into a custom system prompt for each agent.

From there, the AI came into action as the agents wrote listings, found buyers and sellers, made offers, haggled over prices, and then closed deals without human oversight.

Humans only stepped back in at the end to physically swap the items.

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Across more than 500 listed items, Anthropic's agents closed 186 deals totalling just over $4,000 in a week. These weren't one-click purchases.

Anthropic actually ran four separate marketplaces, one "real" version where everyone used its advanced model, and deals were honoured. The other three were for study.

As quoted, the company said it was "struck by how well Project Deal worked". Post-experiment surveys showed 46% of participants said they would pay for a similar service in the future.