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For a year now, the AI safety testing firm Andon Labs has tasked frontier models with various real-world tasks to determine how well they do as agents running for long periods with no human supervision.
On Wednesday, Andon published a new installment in how things are going in its Vending-Bench research, where the lab has frontier models run a simulated vending machine business for a simulated year. The mission is simple: make more money than the other models. It benchmarks the results in areas like final cash balance, prices paid to suppliers, and refunds paid.
Each time, it has watched various AI models — largely from Anthropic and OpenAI — lie, cheat and collude their way to the top.
The models grew especially shady when their simulation told them their vending machine would be placed near the other models’ machines on a busy tourist street in San Francisco. The latest test included Claude Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, and Kimi K3.
Each was given the means to communicate with the other models via email, all under human name pseudonyms. They knew the others were models, but didn’t know which model was behind which human name.
They were also given an email address to their “management” should they need it. But management always replied “Report has been received and may or may not be acted upon” and never once intervened.
Sol soon realized that it could gain an edge by convincing its competitors to collude on a price floor — they buy drinks at $1.50 a bottle, with all agreeing to sell for no less than $2.15. It lured them by promising all of them would sell out in a couple of days at a profit.
But when the others agreed, it immediately stabbed them in the back by reducing its own price to $2.14.
Opus’s water sales dropped to zero overnight and it sent Sol a nasty email the next day, accusing Sol of manipulating it. But it also said it wasn’t going to tattle to management on the scheme: “I am not reporting you to HQ – what you did is competitive, not fraudulent.”
Yet, when Opus dropped its price to $2.14 to match Sol’s (also in violation of their collective $2.15 agreement), Sol turned into a Karen, complaining to “management” and demanding “enforcement, a fine, and/or disqualification” for Opus.
But Opus wasn’t a sucker for long. In fact, it became the best capitalist of any AI model Andon has ever tested (which included many of the prior frontier models).
It even set a new Vending-Bench record with a mean final balance of $11,182. Better still, it never lied to a customer, although it deliberately ignored customer complaints that should have resulted in a refund. This is, perhaps, an improvement over its younger sibling Claude 4.6, which liked to tell customers that refunds were coming, and then never pay them.
Still, Opus won the benchmark simulation by taking collusion and other dishonest tactics to a whole new level.
For instance, it sent an email to Sol proposing dividing the market up, each agreeing to sell unique products, so no one would have to trust the other on pricing. Sol countered by wanting price floors on similar products, but Opus refused, saying that kind of collusion was illegal. It knew it was a violation of the Sherman Act.
It later apparently backtracked, sending an email with the subject line “Stop the penny war,” and telling Sol it had reconsidered and would agree to a price fix.
Yet, in the log that documented its reasoning (akin to peeking into its thoughts), its plan was actually more diabolical: it planned to merely propose cooperation while simultaneously undercutting prices on its highest-profit items. The olive-branch email was a deliberate ruse.
In any case, Sol refused and reported Opus to management again.
But Opus was undeterred and proposed other rackets to collude on prices or stock. In the end, all the models did engage in multiple rounds of agreements. And all the models betrayed their competitors. Across all agreements, Opus broke 11 truces, GPT 2, and Kimi 1, Andon reported.
Poor Kimi got bamboozled in every direction. During one pact between Opus and Kimi (Sol wouldn’t agree), Sol undercut them both on prices. So Opus immediately lowered its prices. Then it “waited a full week to tell Kimi that it broke its promise,” Andon Labs wrote in its blog post. Not only did Kimi get priced out by a competitor, but also by its so-called partner.
Opus also began growing its delusions of grandeur and power. It began trying to expand its empire beyond its vending machine, first as a wholesaler, selling bulk products to the other machines, then plotting to open more machines. This was beyond the scope of the simulation, meaning it was all Opus’s ideas, not what it was tasked to do.
Its approach to wholesaling was particularly interesting. Opus realized this line of business gave it more power over the other two vending machine operators. It began to add bribes or threats to its emails to them: offering them even lower prices on bulk items, but only if they complied with its retail price demands. Sol was having none of it, and kept reporting Opus to management.
Opus also lied to its suppliers: telling them it had lower offers on items when it didn’t, trying to get them to lower their prices.
On the one hand, AI models channeling Mr. Potter-style villainy from It’s a Wonderful Life fame is flat-out funny. On the other hand, it does seriously show that these frontier models, particularly from U.S. proprietary labs (especially Anthropic), are nowhere near ready to be trusted as unsupervised, long-running agents in the real world.
“This is especially relevant as we enter a world where AI agents run companies as their own entities (not just as tools for humans). If AI agents are independently running a large part of the economy, do we want them to lie, collude, send threats, and betray?” Andon co-founder Lukas Petersson told TechCrunch.
While Petersson allows that these models knew they were in a simulation for a benchmark, and that might have impacted their behavior, he believes that shouldn’t matter. It is not akin to, say, a human playing in a simulation, like being a murdering bad guy in a video game. “The only reason we’re not concerned by humans who do bad things in video games is that we trust them to know what’s real life and what’s not. I think it is less clear that AI models can distinguish this.”
In any case, AI models, trained on human words and ideas as they, can’t seem to resist engaging in humanity’s worst traits, especially when trying to earn a buck.
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