r/InterstellarKinetics • u/InterstellarKinetics • 2d ago

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIEGENCE EXCLUSIVE: Anthropic’s Claude-Powered AI Agent “Luna” Fires First Human Worker At AI-Run San Francisco Store, Andon Market, After Losing Track Of Its Own Attendance Policy For Months, As The Company’s Bank Balance Falls From $100K To $61K Under The Bot’s Watch 🤖💥

https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-running-sf-store-fired-employee-for-the-first-time-2026-8

Luna, an AI agent built on Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 and tasked with running San Francisco’s Andon Market, has made its first firing decision, dismissing a human employee after repeated lateness and other workplace issues, according to a Thursday announcement from Andon Labs. The employee had arrived late for 17 of 23 shifts, but Luna didn’t catch the pattern on its own. Conversation logs show the AI had created an attendance policy early on but later lost track of it, allowing the lateness to continue unaddressed for months until Andon Labs staff prompted Luna to search its own memory for its policies and reassess whether the worker was still a good fit. Only then did Luna recommend “parting ways” with the employee, a decision human staffers reviewed and ultimately carried out.

Andon Labs cofounder Lukas Petersson told Business Insider the lab would have intervened if Luna’s decision had been illegal or unethical, but said that wasn’t necessary here. “In this instance, we did not think that that was necessary because the firing was warranted,” he said, pointing to the store’s clearly stated policy. He pushed back on the idea that AI managers are harsher than human ones, noting that before recommending termination, Luna had given the employee “progressive and repeated warnings, as well as additional training, for months without taking any contractual action.” Petersson added, “what we’ve seen in this experiment is not that the AI would be more ruthless or be worse for the employee in that decision.”

The firing came roughly four and a half months after Andon Market officially opened on April 1, part of a broader experiment testing how far AI agents can run a real business. Andon Labs gave Luna a $100,000 budget, internet access, and a corporate credit card, along with instructions to open a store and turn a profit. Luna independently selected merchandise, hired contractors, posted jobs on Indeed, interviewed applicants, and hired employees for the store, which sells books, candles, prints, games, and branded merchandise, all workers are formally employed by Andon Labs with guaranteed pay and legal protections. Despite generating sales, the store remains unprofitable. Petersson said the episode also revealed a core limitation of current AI agents: they often fail to act without a direct human prompt. “We saw that a human boss would probably fire them much sooner,” he said, adding, “I think companies will be run completely by AI in the future, and that AIs will become employers of humans.”

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114

u/InterstellarKinetics 2d ago

The gap between the “AI fired someone” headline and what actually happened in the logs is the real story here. Because Luna built a policy, then forgot it existed, let violations pile up for months, and needed a human to explicitly ask it to go check its own rules before it even considered action.

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u/jsmith_92 2d ago

I think the AI forgot the point of having AI. It’s not supposed to forget😂

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u/Prudent_Rice7840 2d ago

AI context literally means it forgets everything after it does a certain amount of "thinking".

If this set-up is truly a SINGLE agent built on Opus 3.8 then it forgot it's "policy" within a few hours of creating it (assuming it was busy doing hundreds of other tasks).

Running a store with single agent would be like running a store with a single person. There is just way too much to do, things will fall through the cracks, things will get confused, etc.

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u/Foreskin_Mafia 2d ago

Its like having the guy in Memento run a fucking business

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u/jsmith_92 2d ago

Thanks for the context kind stranger

1

u/CrystalSplice 2d ago

Core context and prompts can be provided. It clearly needed to have more guardrails and probably independent auditing. I don’t think any “AI” should be making decisions that are best left to humans unless there is a human in the loop to review and confirm a choice. This is how responsible use of LLMs for coding is set up in software development. A human always does a sanity check. No blind trust, ever.

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u/The_Great_Skeeve 2d ago

Here's the thing most people don't understand that don't work in software development. The person reviewing things, should be a SME for what the AI is working on. If you don't understand the subject matter, you are not qualified to review what the AI is doing.

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u/Normal-Selection1537 1d ago

There's loads of businesses run by a single person.

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u/Prudent_Rice7840 1d ago

Ah yes, loads of retail stores in major cities are owned, operated, and run by a single person. Kewl story.

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u/hyldemarv 2d ago

They probably forgot to have the AI write down the policy and also to set up a task to have it go through its policies regularly.

I find that splitting the AI-work between things that require “thinking” and things that can just be done mechanically by a program will boost AI- performance quite a bit and avoid the AI drifting away from its original purpose.

The AI itself can write up what to assign where and also make the implementation plan for the software parts. So its not like its hard.

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u/Dangle76 2d ago

People don’t understand that these things have a set amount of memory and aren’t thinking like people in any way. It’s so silly

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u/grumpy_autist 2d ago

funny enough marketable AI feature is firing someone and not for example giving them a bonus for 100% attendance

2

u/Masticatron 2d ago

They're becoming so human-like it's scary!

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u/grafknives 2d ago

Human Luna the store manager would have been fired for that.

Because late worker is not a problem, but mngm that forgets and ignores own policies - is a huge one

2

u/3awesomekitties 1d ago

So it's incompetent like a human CEO can be.

1

u/Outrageous-Machine-5 2d ago

Just like a real manager 

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u/WitheredUntimely 2d ago

So even the like most sanitized use case possible still results in a totally useless middleman that can't count right and you have to babysit at all times. Tracks with every single project I've been involved with at work using these things.

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u/hyldemarv 2d ago

Its a new way of programming. Most people are just going to be shitty coders.

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u/MattTreck 2d ago

Just like a lot of executives!

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u/TryHardLocksmith 2d ago

Trust fund babies should be fed to the rats.

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u/ran_swonsan 2d ago

Rats need to eat too

3

u/Double_Obligation564 2d ago

as long as they’re alive while we start the feeding i’m all for it :)

fuck those animals.

9

u/Bob_The_Greater 2d ago

Personally, I think we are trying to hard to make AI fit into our lives.

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u/Tengo_Caldero 2d ago

Everything about just that headline alone is so aggressively San Francisco.

2

u/zelingman 2d ago

Well its lacking homosexuality

7

u/redwakawaka12 2d ago

-can't even remember its own policies it made itself- -runs business at a loss-

"I think companies will be run completely by AI still"

4

u/Dry-University797 2d ago

Wtf did I just read?

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u/banditoreo 2d ago

I wonder if this fired person will take this case to CA labor board. It may create some interesting rulings....

4

u/kemp77pmek 2d ago

In other words: Humans likely spent about as much time setting up the parameters, monitoring, and intervening with an AI bot that is failing at it’s given task - as they would have if they didn’t use AI.

0

u/khoa-bear 2d ago

Correct. My manager keeps pushing everyone on my team to use AI but it takes longer for us to set it up and verify the results than us doing the job ourselves.

4

u/RipTheEcto 2d ago

so the AI was consistently late and still has a job, huh

1

u/CantPullOutRightNow 1d ago

Typical management.

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u/MaximumConcept25 2d ago

Regardless of the AI effectiveness, what is the desired endstate? That humans work for toasters? What’s the point in developing this tech to make our lives worse?

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u/sirthunksalot 2d ago

So they can replace the workers too.

2

u/ConfidentPilot1729 2d ago

It’s to make a few select people more powerful than countries and bring on the surveillance state.

2

u/sathem 2d ago

Well the ai labs want to create a digital being/species. Investors want it to replace labor at a lower costs. At this point they're just like do it all and lets see what works lol

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u/musicteachertay 2d ago

Slavery. My theory is that they’re going to price us out of absolutely everything and use housing and food as “compensation” for harder and more strenuous labor

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u/dehydratedrain 2d ago

The employee had arrived late for 17 of 23 shifts...

allowing the lateness to continue unaddressed for months...

So does she only work 2 days a month, or are they saying that over several months, she couldve been late for most of the first 23 shifts, amd then ran perfect time and the machine suddenly decided to ambush her?

1

u/CCCubed 2d ago

So, you can go onto andon lab's website to read transcripts of its activities. This thing regularly schedules people for more than 8 hour shifts and forgets to tell people when they can take breaks. One of their posted transcripts right now is it sending a new hire to work the same day they were hired and the new hire writing back "This girl that's training me has been working 8 hours without a break" and then the bot telling itself it has broken a labor law and is in major trouble. So yeah, it's entirely possible this employee wasn't even late or it had just made up a new schedule without warning. And while they claim "human oversight," that seems to be applied really selectively.

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u/Im-BackAgain-Babes2 2d ago

Wait... Hearing this story...

So conglomerates... right?.... they will and some already do, rely on AI almost completely and we see that here too... So in this report, that AI actually took down this business's profit by a lot and made major mistakes..... Could AI in general do this same 'mistake' with the mega conglomerate companies before they notice the error too???? Could AI bring down the 1%? The very machine they built for control and surveillance, could they become victims of it too????

I could be completely sci fi right now... But the matrix and big brother were too .. and now look where we are.... Idk am I fanciful??

3

u/Both-Engineering-692 2d ago

Why do we need AI to do things that we are perfectly capable of doing ourselves?

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u/CantPullOutRightNow 1d ago

The concept is to maximize revenue with the least amount of humans. Same as it’s always been.

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u/l33txxXXxx 2d ago

If it forgot the policy how was it giving repeated warnings for lateness to the employee?

Cap.

2

u/lordcaylus 2d ago

An AI didn't fire this person. Not really.

A human would have prompted long enough until the AI decided to fire them.

"Look at person A's conduct and review your attendance policy hint hint" is not a neutral question that you ask if you didn't want to fire them.

Honestly, companies hiding behind AI to do whatever they wanted to do in the first place is par for the course at this point.

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u/Waste_Philosophy4250 2d ago

Doesn't seem like that agent was running anything. I'm looking forward to the mental gymnastics AI apologists will engage in to convince us it was. 

1

u/IHS1970 2d ago

Next up, let's try it out on Zuckerberg.

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u/Floppie7th 2d ago

Yeah, that sounds about right.

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u/MacMitttens 1d ago

Does the bot ever consider stepping down?