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Amid the rapid development of artificial intelligence, Anthropic quietly launched an internal experiment called "Project Deal" last Friday, demonstrating the potential of AI in the e-commerce sector. In this experiment, Anthropic's AI model, Claude, autonomously conducted buying and selling and price negotiations in a closed market environment, involving real financial transactions.
The core of the experiment was to build an internal marketplace via Slack, where Claude was given the responsibility of negotiating as both buyer and seller. First, Claude interviewed 69 employees to collect their buying and selling intentions and personalized instructions, then independently conducted the negotiation process. During the experiment, Claude successfully facilitated 186 transactions with a total transaction value exceeding $4,000, indicating the capability of AI to operate in real market environments.
To ensure the comprehensiveness of the experiment, Anthropic also set up four parallel markets to compare the performance of different AI models in negotiations. The results showed that differences in model capabilities significantly affected the transaction outcomes. For example, in a matchup between the Opus and Haiku models, the Opus model performed significantly better in negotiations than the Haiku model, while the employees participating in the survey were unaware of this. This finding offers a new perspective on future commercial interactions between AI systems.
The release of "Project Deal" has sparked widespread attention in the market, particularly regarding the potential threat to traditional e-commerce platforms. After the news spread, eBay's stock price fell by about 4.5% by the close of the day. Market observers generally believe that this drop is closely related to the application of AI technology, especially its disruptive impact on e-commerce models.
Although Anthropic chose to release the experiment during a time of high market fragmentation, the market reaction was still significant, highlighting the disruptive potential of AI in the e-commerce sector.