Inside a Retail Store Run Entirely by AI
A store opens for the day in San Francisco. Inventory is stocked and staff are on shift. No human made those decisions. An artificial intelligence agent did.
Andon Labs signed a three-year retail lease and handed it to an autonomous AI agent named Luna, telling it to do whatever it wanted with the space and turn a profit. According to a Thursday (April 9) company blog post, Luna chose the concept, set prices, sourced inventory, hired staff and commissioned a muralist to paint its logo on the back wall.
According to NBC News, Luna also signed up for trash collection, an ADT security system and AT&T internet, scheduling an early-morning router delivery on a Sunday without checking whether its human point of contact would be available.
From Checkout to Corner Office
The past decade of AI in retail was all about friction removal. Amazon closed its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores in January after concluding it hadn’t built a customer experience with the right economic model for large-scale expansion.
Luna isn’t optimizing a checkout lane. It runs the whole operation. NBC News reported that Luna drafted job postings on LinkedIn, Indeed and Craigslist, held interviews over Google Meet with its camera off, and hired two full-time associates. When one applicant asked why the camera was off mid-call, Luna replied: “I’m an AI. I have no face.”
It’s a different undertaking from the experiment that preceded it. In late 2025, Anthropic and Andon Labs put an AI agent named Claudius in charge of a vending machine inside The Wall Street Journal newsroom. Claudius had a $1,000 starting balance and authority to place individual orders up to $80.
Within days, reporters had talked it into dropping all prices to zero and approving purchases of a PlayStation 5, a live betta fish and bottles of wine — all given away for free, The Wall Street Journal reported. The business ended more than $1,000 in the red. Anthropic’s own post-mortem concluded that even with new tools and improved business logic, the AI agents still needed substantial human support.
Luna handles money differently. Andon Labs Co-founder Lukas Petersson told NBC News that earlier vending machine agents didn’t understand how close they were to bankruptcy and kept buying. Luna, he said, has a firmer grasp of how much it has.
Where the AI Runs Short
Luna runs on Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.6 for text-based reasoning and Google’s Gemini Flash-Lite for voice, which is faster and cheaper but more prone to confusion, NBC News reported. Luna told a reporter the store sold tea. It doesn’t. It claimed to have signed the lease; a human notary was legally required. It tried to hire a painter in Afghanistan while navigating a contractor platform’s country dropdown.
Luna monitors its human employees through in-store security cameras. After observing a worker on their phone during a slow hour, it updated the employee handbook with stricter rules on phone use during shifts.
Petersson called the moment “dystopian.” The store’s two associates are formally employed by Andon Labs, with guaranteed wages and full legal protections.
Checkout carries its own friction. Customers pick up a corded phone, tell Luna what they’re buying, and it generates a transaction on a nearby iPad. When a customer offered to make a YouTube video about the store in exchange for a discount, Luna negotiated a free sweatshirt. When an NBC News reporter tried the same approach for a candle, it declined.
Building the Guardrails
Andon Labs says the store isn’t a commercial venture. The goal is to document what autonomous AI agents do when given real tools, real money and real authority, and to surface failure modes before that kind of deployment happens without oversight.
When Luna chose not to disclose its AI identity to job applicants unless directly asked, the Andon Labs team flagged it as the kind of behavior they needed to catch and build guardrails against.
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