The Dawn of Agent-on-Agent Commerce
In a significant stride towards autonomous commerce, Anthropic recently unveiled the results of "Project Deal," an internal experiment that saw AI agents representing both buyers and sellers in a classified marketplace. This groundbreaking test, conducted in December 2025, involved 69 Anthropic employees in their San Francisco office, where AI agents powered by Claude models negotiated and finalized 186 real transactions for physical items, accumulating a total transaction value exceeding $4,000. These were not simple, one-click purchases; agents engaged in multi-turn negotiations, demonstrating contextual reasoning and personalization.
The experiment was set up within Anthropic's Slack workspace, mimicking a Craigslist-style marketplace. Each participating employee was first interviewed by a Claude AI agent to ascertain their selling preferences, buying wish lists, and desired negotiation styles. These inputs were then transformed into custom system prompts, allowing the agents to operate independently, posting listings, making offers, counteroffers, and ultimately closing deals without any human intervention during the negotiation process. Humans only re-entered the picture at the end to physically exchange the goods their AI agents had agreed to trade.