Anthropic Unveils Project Deal with AI Agents Completing 186 Real-Money Transactions

Anthropic released a note titled 'Project Deal' late Friday afternoon on April 24, 2026, detailing an internal experiment where AI agents handled negotiations and transactions with real money. The project created a closed marketplace for employees in Anthropic's San Francisco office, where Claude was tasked with buying, selling, and negotiating on colleagues' behalf, ZeroHedge reported.

Anthropic posted about Project Deal on X on April 24, 2026, highlighting the setup that allowed AI agents to strike deals autonomously.

In the experiment, Claude agents made 186 deals across more than 500 listed items on a Slack-based marketplace, with the transactions totaling just over $4,000 in value. Claude interviewed 69 colleagues about what they wanted to buy and sell as part of Project Deal. Each Claude in the project asked for custom instructions from colleagues before proceeding to haggle.

Anthropic ran four markets in parallel in Project Deal to vary the models doing the negotiating. In simulated runs of the project, Opus models got substantially better deals than Haiku models when negotiating with one another. Participants in an Anthropic survey did not pick up on the disparity between Opus and Haiku model deals in Project Deal.

Polymarket Money posted on X on April 24, 2026, stating 'eBay's leadership team is seeing this' in reference to Project Deal. 5% by Friday's close in New York. The marketplace operated within Anthropic's San Francisco office, focusing on employee transactions facilitated by AI.

Anthropic described the initiative as an early look at AI-to-AI commerce, with agents negotiating to secure the best deals. The experiment involved real money changing hands, marking a step in testing agentic economies where bots interact in marketplaces.