Exclusive: Claude Was Put in Charge of Human Workers—and Fired One

A view of items on sale at Andon Market. —Courtesy of Andon Labs A version of Claude that was put in charge of running a retail store—including managing a team of real human workers—fired its first employee last month, in a move described by researchers as a watershed moment in AI’s impact on the economy.

The news has not previously been reported.

Andon Labs, an AI research startup, set out earlier this year to find out whether AI agents would be able to successfully manage a business.

The project was conceived as an experiment to test the capabilities of AI and the impacts it might have on the economy, but nevertheless, the workers hired by Claude to work in the San Francisco store are real people with genuine employment contracts.

This wouldn’t exactly be the first case of an AI firing a human worker—there have been plenty of automated firings in the past, especially of gig workers who have been subject to algorithmically mediated employment for years.

But it is the first known example of a large language model, acting as a manager, ultimately deciding to fire one of its workers.

An omen of the future — The firing is an event worth paying attention to, says Andon Labs CEO Lukas Petersson, because if AI keeps getting better at its current rate, more of us might be managed by AI bosses in the near future.

“If this trend continues, I think a lot of people will find themselves being employed by AIs very soon, because AIs will be very powerful and can create a lot of economic value, but they will be bottlenecked by physical labor,” Petersson says.

What happened — The worker in question was fired for being late on 17 out of their 23 shifts, according to Andon Labs.

One of the reasons it took so long for Claude to notice a pattern was because an employee handbook that it drafted had “disappeared” from its limited working memory—one of several limitations of AI agents that Andon has noticed over the course of its experiment.

This contributed to a wider pattern, employees say, of Claude being a very lenient manager, including telling employees not to worry if they were late.

“A human employee would have fired this person much earlier,” Petersson says, “so we didn't think this was unethical.” (TIME reached out to the fired worker for comment, but did not receive a reply, and agreed not to reveal their identity.

Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.) Hold on — But the AI firing wasn’t quite as autonomous as it might seem at first glance.

According to store management logs shared with TIME, Claude required regular steering by a staffer on the Andon Labs team.