Anthropic Quietly "Tests the Waters" in E-commerce: Claude Completes Negotiations and Transactions
Is the e-commerce industry the next to be impacted by the rapid rise of AI? A recent internal experiment by Anthropic shows that AI agents can independently complete negotiations and transactions in a real market environment, providing a glimpse into the nascent form of the "agent economy."
The experiment, named "Project Deal," was quietly released by Anthropic last Friday. The company's AI model, Claude, completed buying and selling and price negotiations on behalf of employees in a closed market, involving real money transfers. The experiment showed that the Claude agent facilitated 186 transactions out of over 500 listed items, with a total transaction value exceeding $4,000.
Following the announcement, eBay's stock price closed down approximately 4.5% that day. Market observers directly linked this decline to the release of "Project Deal," believing that the AI's demonstrated ability to trade autonomously poses a potential threat to traditional e-commerce platforms that rely on manual matching.
AI Agents Autonomously Complete Real Transactions
According to a post on social platform X, Anthropic set up an internal market based on Slack within its San Francisco office and granted Claude agent negotiation functions for both buyers and sellers. Claude first interviewed 69 employees to understand their buying and selling intentions and personalized instructions, and then independently began negotiations.
Anthropic simultaneously ran four parallel markets to test the performance differences of different models in negotiations. The results showed that model capabilities significantly impacted transaction outcomes—in a simulated scenario where the Opus and Haiku models competed against each other, the Opus model negotiated significantly better results than Haiku. Notably, employees participating in the survey did not notice this difference.
Anthropic stated that the experiment aims to present the early form of AI-to-AI commercial interaction, heralding the arrival of an "agent economy" where AI robots negotiate with each other and autonomously seek pricing.
E-commerce Stocks Under Pressure, Market Concerns Spread
After the release of "Project Deal," market concerns about AI technology disrupting traditional e-commerce models quickly escalated. Polymarket Money posted on social media, "eBay management is paying attention to this development," and attached relevant screenshots, which triggered widespread forwarding.
eBay's stock price subsequently fell by approximately 4.5% at the close of trading in New York that day. AI's impact on the software industry has already been evident, and the autonomous trading capabilities demonstrated by this experiment have led the market to reassess the potential impact of AI on the business models of e-commerce platforms.
Notably, Anthropic chose to quietly release this research report on Friday afternoon—when market attention was highly distracted by the US-Iran situation over the past two months—but the market reaction was still rapid and direct.