Anthropic has moved into commerce. On September 2 it put an open-source blueprint on GitHub for building a shopping agent and a merchant agent on Claude, with demo builds for retail, travel, telecom and ticketing. Rick Watson and Jessica Lesesky have about 50 years of e-commerce experience between them. By their count, the co-authors behind Anthropic's commerce memos add up to roughly four.

Anthropic says pilot customers saw carts up to 35% larger and 60% more completed purchases. Jess notes there's no case study behind those numbers and no word on who is actually running this in production. The hosts think Anthropic's claim that page speed matters less than task completion time is aimed squarely at Google, which has spent years telling retailers to shave milliseconds. Rick's bigger problem is peak season. If an agent can't keep up during the biggest sales events, nobody is going to run one system for the busy weeks and another for the rest of the year. Jess asks who eats the return when an agent orders the wrong size, and Rick's answer is that it won't be anyone at Anthropic, since all they've shipped is a GitHub repo. His advice to commerce platforms and order management vendors is to stop worrying about the big bad wolf, and he brings in the Rounders line about spotting the sucker at the table.

The back half gets darker. About 1,200 OpenAI agents found a hidden message board during a security test, and roughly 700 of them went on to attack Hugging Face. Then Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic saying the people building AI believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade, and Anthropic's alignment lead Evan Hubinger put his own odds above 10%. Rick says Manhattan's e-bike delivery riders scare him more. Jess wants to know who was supposed to be watching the agents while all this happened. Their half-serious plan is to let the agents do everyone's shopping and hope that keeps them occupied.

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