Anthropic builds itself a shopkeepAIr

We all know that AI is seconds away from being able to cook our dinner, stroke our pets and write wonderfully wry micro-reviews of adverts 😱, but, as Anthropic proved in its latest experiment, it might not be up for running a business just yet.

Named Project Vend, the company’s experiment saw its AI model placed in charge of a real-world office vending machine, tasked with setting prices, managing stock and making decisions that would normally fall to a human operator.

With its humorous and reassuring non-world-dominating results captured entertainingly by Justin Paviolo-Knowles through Ghost Story Studio, including moments of over-generosity, questionable pricing logic and a tendency to prioritise politeness over profit, this charming doc goes to show that we don’t need to pack up the high street just yet.