Anthropic Frontier Red Team ยท December 18, 2025

Project Vend: Phase Two

Why it matters

In June, we revealed that we'd set up a small shop in our San Francisco office run by an AI shopkeeper. It did not do particularly well. We made some adjustments for phase two of Project Vend. The idea of an AI running a business doesn't seem as far-fetched as it once did. But the gap between 'capable' and 'completely

My takeaway: Project Vend: Phase Two is an enterprise-adoption signal. The practical read is to watch how deployment scale, data boundaries, operational ownership, and platform controls change as AI moves out of experiments.