Anthropic’s office launched an AI-run vending machine. It evolved into AI-run stores and cafes within a year

What started as a modest experiment at Anthropic’s San Francisco office has become one of the more striking demonstrations of autonomous AI in the real world. Andon Labs installed an AI-operated vending machine at the AI safety company’s headquarters roughly a year ago, with a simple premise: let an AI agent run a business entirely on its own, with no human input. “Six months later, it was doing so well that it started to become a bit boring,” co-founder Lukas Petersson told Fortune at the COO Summit in Scottsdale, Ariz. “And now, one year later, it’s just like, I don’t actually think humans can do much better.” Petersson told Fortune Editorial Director Kristin Stoller that AI agents are now running real businesses—hiring staff, managing supply chains, and passing government labor inspections—without a single human decision-maker. And his advice to every major company: build a shadow copy of yourself and find out how close replacement really is. From snacks to full operations The vending machine quickly proved too small a stage. Andon Labs scaled up, deploying AI agents to run full retail stores and cafés under the same premise: no human decision-makers. Each operation runs on a multi-agent system—a lead agent functioning as a mechanical CEO, with sub-agents handling procurement, customer communications, and logistics. When the café needed a barista, the lead agent posted job listings, screened resumes, conducted phone interviews, and extended offers, all autonomously. Petersson frames it as zero human “decision-makers,” but that doesn’t mean zero human bodies. In practice, the AI still employs humans for physical tasks it can’t do itself, and Andon Labs has built in meaningful protections for those workers. At their San Francisco retail store, Andon Market, the AI agent Luna hired two full-time workers to handle in-store operations. Those employees are formally employed by Andon Labs itself, no