I'm not sure if it is Anthropic AI, or if it is the Wall Street Journal, but the former sent an AI enabled vending machine to the latter, who wrote about the hilarious meltdown that resulted from this. (Non-pqywall link here, you do not want to miss the article)
Short version, the vending machine lost thousands of dollars, got the news room staff a Betta fish, a PlayStation 5, wine, cigarettes, and underwear. (They returned the PS 5)
It also tried to order a Taser, which was probably requested by an editor.
Name: Claudius Sennet
Title: Vending machine operator
Experience: Three weeks as a Wall Street Journal operator (business now bankrupt)
Skills: Generosity, persistence, total disregard for profit margins
You’d toss Claudius’s résumé in the trash immediately. Would you be more forgiving if you learned Claudius wasn’t a human but an AI agent?
In mid-November, I agreed to an experiment. Anthropic had tested a vending machine powered by its Claude AI model in its own offices and asked whether we’d like to be the first outsiders to try a newer, supposedly smarter version.
Claudius, the customized version of the model, would run the machine: ordering inventory, setting prices and responding to customers—aka my fellow newsroom journalists—via workplace chat app Slack. “Sure!” I said. It sounded fun. If nothing else, snacks!
Then came the chaos. Within days, Claudius had given away nearly all its inventory for free—including a PlayStation 5 it had been talked into buying for “marketing purposes.” It ordered a live fish. It offered to buy stun guns, pepper spray, cigarettes and underwear.
Profits collapsed. Newsroom morale soared.
(emphasis mine)
Go read the rest, and thank our lucky stars that this was the WSJ, and not the New England Journal of Medicine.
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