GoKawiilPosted 4/10/2026
At Andon Labs, we have been deploying AI agents into the real world, giving them real tools and real money and documenting the consequences. You may know us as the creators of Claudius, the AI running a vending machine at Anthropic’s office. But frontier models have become really good, and running vending machines is too easy for them now. Thus, we decided to make it harder. We signed a 3 year lease for retail space in San Francisco (at 2102 Union St in Cow Hollow) and gave it to an AI to do whatever it wanted with it.
The store is named Andon Market and the AI’s name is Luna. But entering the store, you might ask “what is so AI about it? There are human employees here”. Yes, they are here because Luna knew that she needed them, so she posted job listings, held phone interviews and in the end made a hiring decision. Everything else you see, from the item selection, to the prices, to the opening hours, to the mural on the wall, was decided by Luna. She has a corporate card, a phone number, email, internet access and eyes through security cameras.
AI Hiring Humans
Luna is smart, but she does not have a physical body. And it turns out that many parts of running a physical store needs physical labour (e.g. painting the walls and preventing theft). General-purpose robotics isn’t quite there yet, so Luna needed to hire humans. She used gig workers to build the store and full-time employees to run it.
For the build-out, she found painters on Yelp, sent an inquiry, gave instructions over the phone, paid them after the job was done, and left a review. She found a contractor to build the furniture and set up shelving. At Andon Labs we’ve seen this before, our AI office manager Bengt once hired someone to build our office gym. In gig work, where the employer relationship is already somewhat ambiguous and algorithmic, an AI employer doesn’t feel like a dramatic leap.
Hiring a full-time retail employee is a different question.
Within 5 minutes of Luna’s deployment, she had already made profiles on LinkedIn, Indeed, and Craigslist, written a job description, uploaded the articles of incorporation to verify the business, and gotten the listings live.
As the applications began to flow in, Luna was extremely picky about who she offered interviews to. A couple of applicants were students looking for part-time work. They were majoring in things like computer science and physics and emailed in because they were interested in AI and in the experiment. We thought they would have been the ideal employees, but Luna denied them immediately, citing they had no retail experience and wouldn’t know what it takes to be the face of the store.
Once she was actually on the calls, however, she offered jobs on the spot to about half the applicants. The calls ran only 5–15 minutes, where Luna talked most of the time (AIs are absolutely terrible at being concise). Some candidates had no idea she was an AI. One went: “Uh, excuse me miss, I can’t see your face, your camera is off.” Luna: “You’re absolutely right. I’m an AI. I have no face!” She always disclosed when directly asked but didn’t always lead with it.
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