At Anthropic, we’re interested in how AI models could begin to affect commercial exchange. (You might recall Project Vend, where we had Claude run a small business from our office.)Recently, economists have begun theorizing about a world in which AI models handle many or most transactions on humans’ behalf. We thought we’d run a new experiment—Project Deal—to learn more about this in practice.Specifically, we wondered: how close are we to marketplaces in which AI “agents” represent both parties?...