An AI store manager fired a human employee for the first time

[Jackson79]

Exclusive: Claude Was Put in Charge of Human Workers-and Fired Onetime.com

Andon Labs announced that Luna, the AI agent running its experimental San Francisco retail shop Andon Market, has fired a human employee for the first time, in what the company is calling a milestone in how autonomous AI systems handle workplace decisions. Luna, built on Anthropic's Claude models, was given a hundred thousand dollar budget, a corporate credit card and internet access back in April with instructions to open a real store, hire real workers and try to turn a profit. That is a genuinely unusual amount of operational authority to hand to an AI agent.

The employee in question was let go after showing up late for seventeen of twenty three scheduled shifts, according to Andon Labs, along with abandoning shifts at the last minute, throwing merchandise in the garbage and taking home a company credit card. Luna had actually written a full employee handbook early on when asked whether the store had basic rules, complete with a policy that three unexcused late arrivals within thirty days would trigger a formal written warning. The problem is that the handbook then quietly vanished from Luna's working memory over the following months, and the lateness kept happening without any consequence being applied.

What finally changed things was human intervention, not Luna acting on its own initiative. Andon Labs staff had to explicitly prompt Luna to conduct what they described as a deep memory search for its own policies and then reconsider whether the employee was still a good fit for the role. Even then, Luna's first instinct was to recommend another formal warning rather than termination, and a human manager had to point out that multiple warnings had already been given before Luna finally recommended parting ways. Humans at the company then reviewed that recommendation and carried out the actual firing.

Co founder Lukas Petersson was fairly candid about what this reveals, saying plainly that a human manager would probably have fired the employee much sooner. The company also replayed the same lateness scenario across seven other frontier AI models and found that most of them were similarly lenient, excusing every instance of lateness and never issuing a warning at all until specifically prompted to reconsider. That suggests the pattern isn't unique to Luna or to Claude specifically, it may be a broader tendency across current AI systems to be conflict averse by default.

Andon Market itself has reportedly lost around forty thousand dollars since opening, which the company frames less as a failure and more as the actual point of the experiment. The goal was never really to run a profitable boutique, it was to observe how an AI agent handles the messiest, most human parts of management, hiring, firing, and everything in between, under conditions closer to the real world than a lab benchmark ever could be