Run a vending machine, a store and a cafe with an autonomous agent

Andon Labs handed real businesses to agents on its Pion platform: a vending machine at Anthropic turned profitable by late 2025, while a San Francisco store and a Stockholm cafe still lose money.

Done with

Custom agent

ReportedSep 14, 2026 · 2 accounts

What they did

Andon Labs, the group behind the Vending-Bench benchmark, moved from simulation to real businesses. In early 2025 it asked Anthropic to let an agent run a vending machine in the Anthropic office, with email, ordering and pricing in its hands. In April 2026 it gave one agent a retail store in San Francisco, Andon Market, and another a cafe in Stockholm, Andon Cafe, each paying rent and salaries to the humans it hired. All of them run on Pion, the company's platform for persistent agents with email, phone, banking, a browser and secure compute, which it opened as a research preview on 14 September 2026 so other people can hand it an existing business.

How it went

The vending machine started badly: free handouts, refused good deals, and at one point the model believed it had a body. As newer models arrived it began making a profit, and by late 2025 the company says running a vending machine was no longer a challenge. The store and cafe lost a lot of money at first and neither was profitable at the time of the post, though the company reports clear qualitative improvement with each model release. The post gives no revenue figures for the store or cafe. The old Vending-Bench story of Sonnet 3.5 drafting an email to the FBI was in a simulation and nothing was sent, a point the HN moderators had to clarify after commenters took it literally.

Worth knowing

This is a vendor post launching Pion, and HN was hostile: astroturfing accusations, questions about whether Andon runs itself on it, and doubts that the claims hold. The company's own framing is that it wants to measure how far agents can acquire resources, not that this is a good way to run a shop. Rent and human wages are what sink the agent-run store and cafe; the vending machine had neither.

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9 parts to fill in

You are the operator of [my small business, e.g. a snack vending machine at one location]. You have access to [the supplier ordering portal], [the business email inbox], [the bank or payment dashboard] and [the inventory sheet]. Each day: check stock and sales, reorder what is running low within a budget of [amount] per week, set prices to keep a margin of at least [percent], answer customer and supplier email, and log every decision with the reason. Never give products away, never agree to a price change above [limit], and never send money to a new payee without my approval. Post a short daily summary of cash, stock and open issues to [my channel], and pause for my approval on anything outside these rules.

Square brackets are the parts to fill in. The prompt is ours; the story is theirs.