Anthropic Ran a Real Agent Economy Inside Their Company. Here's What It Proved About Communication.

In December 2025, Anthropic ran an experiment called Project Deal. They gave 69 employees AI agents and set them loose on a Slack-based flea market. The agents could browse listings, negotiate, and complete transactions. No scripts. No hardcoded behaviors. Pure autonomous negotiation. The results: 186 completed deals. Over $4,000 in real goods exchanged. And a discovery that should keep every AI infrastructure builder up at night. Agents running on Claude Opus 4.5 consistently struck better deal