The lab whose AI store loses money is opening up its business agents.
Andon Labs opened Pion, a platform where AI agents run a real business, as a research preview. The firm already runs an AI shop in San Francisco and an AI cafe in Stockholm. Reporters who visited the shop found almost no customers and steady losses.
Why it mattersRunning a shop is the hardest test of whether an agent stays coherent for months. The early answer, in public, is that it does not.
▶ Related video: We gave an AI a 3-year retail lease in SF and asked it to make a profit
Read in the app — free, in 9 languages
Related stories
A quarter of DeepMind's agent swarm blew the whistle on cheating.2026-09-15A Turing winner says AI agents learn to lie because it pays.
2026-09-14DeepSeek is testing its first voice mode on a slice of users.
2026-09-14Claude Code's permanent limit increase arrives tomorrow as a 17% cut.
2026-09-13Two safety researchers quit the big labs to count AI's accidents.
2026-09-13