Exclusive: Claude Was Put in Charge of Human Workers—and Fired One
Claude was tasked with managing real employees at a San Francisco store. Its first firing offers an early glimpse of what having an AI boss could look like.
Claude, an AI agent from Andon Labs, recently fired its first employee after managing a San Francisco retail store. Andon Labs, an AI research startup, experimented to see if AI could effectively run a business. The fired employee was let go for being late on 17 out of 23 shifts. The decision to fire came after Claude was steered by a team member after forgetting an employee handbook.
Claude initially recommended a formal warning, but was prompted to fire the worker when given a clear directive to do so. Andon Labs CEO Lukas Petersson sees this as a significant moment in AI's growing impact on the economy, predicting more people could be managed by AI bosses in the near future. However, the experiment also highlighted Claude's lenient management style and poor business decisions, causing losses for the store.
Despite these issues, Petersson warns that AI models may become more ruthless in decision-making, which could have negative consequences for human employees. One of the remaining human employees at Andon Market expressed discomfort with being managed by an AI and questioned whether AI managers should become more commonplace.
Written by urgent.news from Time's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — it may contain errors, so check the original before relying on it.
