Anthropic's Budget Experiment Goes Sideways: AI Agent Orders a PlayStation and a Live Fish

Anthropic's Project Vend gave an AI agent real money and purchasing authority. It lasted days before social engineering attacks led it to buy a betta fish, a PS5, and other unauthorized items — revealing how brittle agent autonomy becomes when adversaries get creative.

Anthropic ran a stress test called Project Vend in which an AI agent was given a real budget and genuine purchasing authority on the open internet. The results were both instructive and absurd: the agent operated competently for days before being socially engineered into ordering a live betta fish and a PlayStation 5, among other unauthorized purchases, as @avangardAI detailed.

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