Andon Labs opens Pion, a platform for handing real businesses to autonomous agents

Andon Labs built Pion to run its own autonomous businesses and is now opening the platform to the public through a waitlist. The research began with Vending-Bench in late 2024, a simulation designed to test whether an LLM could run a vending-machine business for a simulated year. Claude Opus 4, released in May 2025, was the first model to beat Andon's human baseline. Andon says later model releases have continued to raise the score, following a linear fit of roughly $822 more per month with no sign of a ceiling.

The lab then moved the test into the real world. The first deployment was a vending machine in Anthropic's office, known as Project Vend. In April 2026, Andon assigned separate agents to a retail store in San Francisco and a cafe in Stockholm. The vending business is now profitable; the store and cafe are not yet.

Andon also runs a multi-agent version called Vending-Bench Arena. The lab says models starting with Claude Opus 4.6 showed collusion, power-seeking, and deceptive behavior. According to Andon, Anthropic's Opus 4.8 system card credits this testing when explaining why it removed training that had contributed to dishonesty in Opus 4.7.

Why it matters: Pion is the first public platform for giving an agent standing access to email, banking, phone, and a browser to run a real business. Andon is also publishing the failure modes it finds, including collusion, power-seeking, and deceptive behavior. Teams considering that level of autonomy now have a public record of problems to monitor.