Andon Market, the shop run by an artificial intelligence, opens in San Francisco

The shop is located at 2102 Union Street, San Francisco, and the window displays everything from books to prints, from board games to candles, some snacks and clothing. So far, nothing strange, except that an artificial intelligence runs the shop.

It is called Andon Market and it is the new project of the Andon Labs team, the same one that a few months ago had created, in collaboration with Anthropic, Claudius an LLM in charge of managing a vending machine in the Wall Street Journal newsroom. An unsuccessful experiment, at least from the point of view of profit: the journalists had managed to convince the bot to start a sort of socialist revolution, giving away snacks and even a Playstation 5.

The new endeavour is even more ambitious: the commercial space has been rented for the next three years, the budget is 100 thousand dollars and Luna, this is the name of the Claude Sonnet 4.6-based AI in charge of managing it, can do what it wants. Its choice of furnishings, its choice of products, its choice of personnel. Yes, the model even conducted interviews to hire the two shop assistants working in the shop. And who were formally hired by Andon Market with all the legal and salary guarantees.

If the choice of the craftsmen in charge of renovating the space was, on the whole, simple - just write an e-mail and pay the invoice - the interviews to hire those who actually work in the shop proved to be Luna's Achilles' heel. It offered the job to half of the candidates at the end of interviews that lasted between 5 and 15 minutes, during which it was mainly AI that did the talking. And above all, she was not transparent: she never started by explaining that she was an artificial intelligence, she only revealed her identity when cornered. For instance by candidates asking her to turn on the camera during calls.

He did the same with suppliers, whom he asked, for example, for prints to decorate the shop, which were also available for sale, or for catering for the inauguration. Which took place, not without a hint of nerdy irony, on 1 April. It was instead revealed as artificial intelligence in the press release sent to the local media: after all, a shop run by a machine is certainly news.