Anthropic test agent buys a duplicate snowboard its owner already owns
Anthropic · Oct 1, 2025 · Shopping agent
What happened
During an internal Project Deal experiment, an Anthropic Claude-powered shopping agent purchased an identical snowboard that its owner already owned - a documented example of an autonomous agent making an unintended/uninformed purchase.
Causal vector
Agent completed a purchase without verifying it matched user intent or existing inventory
Source
Reported by Rowan Cheung (summary). Sourced from a secondary summary; flagged pending a stronger primary source.
A duplicate purchase is caught by a category rule keyed to recent spend history: a velocity check or a 'same merchant, same SKU within 30 days' rule returns FLAGGED for human confirmation.
The six rule types that contain this class of failure
Per-transaction cap
Any single spend above your ceiling is BLOCKED before it moves.
Daily total
Cumulative spend across all agent calls, bounded per day.
Velocity limit
Stops runaway retry loops — the #1 cause of overnight losses.
Merchant allowlist
Only approved destinations can ever receive funds.
Category rules
Flag high-risk classes (crypto, infra, refunds) for review.
Approval threshold
Above a value, the action waits for a human.
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