Anthropic's Project Swap agents negotiate real book swaps for 201 employees
Anthropic
Anthropic ran Project Swap, a follow-up to Project Deal: 201 employees sent Claude-powered agents onto a digital trading floor to negotiate book swaps. Preference representation was the bottleneck (Claude matched participants' own rankings on 61% of pairs), and model choice mattered far more than negotiation instructions, with findings framed as design input for agentic marketplaces.
Why it matters
Hard numbers on how well consumer agents represent their principal's interests, the core open question for agent-mediated commerce.
Importance: 2/5
Research experiment with applied findings for agent marketplaces
Sources
official
Project Swap