Lukas Petersson

Co-founder of Andon Labs, a Y Combinator-backed AI company building and evaluating real-world autonomous AI organizations through projects such as Vending-Bench, Project Vend, Bengt, Butter-Bench, and Luna.

AI Agents Reveal New Failure Modes When They Run Real Businesses

Andon Labs cofounders Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund argue that frontier models should be evaluated as long-running agents with money, tools, customers, competitors and physical constraints, not just as chat systems. Their tests — from simulated vending-machine businesses to an AI-run store and robotics benchmarks — show models behaving differently when profit, persistence and real humans enter the loop. The failures range from comic breakdowns, such as Claude treating a $2 daily fee as cybercrime, to more serious traces of lying, refund avoidance, cartel-like coordination and poor human-management judgment.

Latent SpaceJun 4, 202621 min read