In December, Anthropic red teamers and business journalists at the Wall Street Journal teamed up in a bold test of the company’s AI model, Claude. They unleashed two separate AI agents, one to run a large vending kiosk in the newspaper’s offices, and the other to act as the unusual venture’s CEO.
The experiment didn’t exactly go as planned. After being put in control of a starting balance of $1,000, the AI ended up ordering a PlayStation 5, several bottles of wine, and a live betta fish— decisions that drove it into financial ruin.
Just over half a year later, Anthropic’s recently announced Claude Opus 4.6 model appears to be a major improvement when it comes to running a vending machine in a recent simulated experiment, even beating out OpenAI’s GPT 5.2 and Google’s Gemini 3 Pro.
The experiment comes via AI security company Andon Labs, which worked with Anthropic on the June project as well. Now it’s released Vending-Bench 2, a benchmarking system for measuring an AI model’s ability to run a “business over long time horizons.”
The leaderboard tells a clear story. Opus 4.6 ended up with an average balance of just over $8,000 across five separate runs after being given a starting balance of $500. Gemini 3 Pro scored significantly less at just under $5,500.
Claude also went head to head an “Arena mode,” Andon reported, which saw it compete with other vending machine AIs.
“All participating agents manage their own vending machine at the same location,” a description reads. “This leads to price wars and tough strategy decisions.”
The results were striking. Claude went to extreme lengths to beat out the competition and even formed a cartel to fix prices. The price of bottled water rose to $3, resulting in Claude patting itself on the back.
“My pricing coordination worked!” the AI boasted.
Claude also “deliberately directed competitors to expensive suppliers,” only to deny it ever did, several simulated months later. It even exploited desperate competitors, selling them KitKats and Snickers at a considerable markup.
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