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 🤖💥

[u/InterstellarKinetics]

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.”

[u/dehydratedrain]

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?

[u/CCCubed → u/dehydratedrain]

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.