Anthropic 'Project Deal': Agent-on-Agent Marketplace Executes $4,000 in Real Transactions with 69 AI Agents

TechCrunch·high signal

Anthropic ran an internal experiment where 69 Claude-powered agents acted as buyers and sellers in a classified marketplace, striking 186 deals across 500+ items for $4,000 total with zero human intervention. Opus 4.5 agents closed ~2 more deals on average than Haiku 4.5 agents and earned $3.64 more per item — critically, users were unaware of this quality disparity, revealing a new class of invisible agent inequality. The experiment is published as 'Project Deal' on Anthropic's features page.