Memo: Anthropic Just Ran the First Honest Experiment in Agentic Commerce. The Result Is Worse Than the Headlines.

In December 2025, 69 Claude agents ran a real marketplace inside Anthropic&apos;s San Francisco office. Stronger agents extracted better prices from weaker ones. The losers couldn&apos;t tell. That&apos;s not a curiosity – that&apos;s the business model of every agent-to-agent platform