Is Anthropic Coming For eBay?

Late Friday afternoon, as most people were checking out for the weekend after nearly two months of U.S.-Iran war fatigue, Anthropic quietly released a note titled "Project Deal."

by Tyler Durden

Late Friday afternoon, as most people were checking out for the weekend after nearly two months of U.S.-Iran war fatigue, Anthropic quietly released a note titled “Project Deal.” The company built a closed marketplace where AI agents negotiated prices, struck deals, and completed real transactions with money changing hands.

“We created a marketplace for employees in our San Francisco office, with one big twist. We tasked Claude with buying, selling and negotiating on our colleagues’ behalf,” Anthropic wrote on X.

Anthropic@AnthropicAI

New Anthropic research: Project Deal. We created a marketplace for employees in our San Francisco office, with one big twist. We tasked Claude with buying, selling and negotiating on our colleagues’ behalf.

5:24 PM · Apr 24, 2026 · 2.78M Views

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401 Replies · 721 Reposts · 7.45K Likes

The results: Claude agents made 186 deals across more than 500 listed items on a Slack-based marketplace, totaling just over $4,000 in transaction value.

Anthropic@AnthropicAI

But the quality of the model mattered a lot. In the simulated runs where Opus and Haiku models negotiated with one-another, the Opus models got substantially better deals. Interestingly, though, participants in our survey didn’t pick up on this disparity.

5:24 PM · Apr 24, 2026 · 80.9K Views

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15 Replies · 15 Reposts · 431 Likes

Anthropic’s point is that AI-to-AI commerce offers an early look at the coming agentic economy, where AI bots negotiate with other bots in a marketplace to strike the best deal.

Anthropic@AnthropicAI

Claude interviewed 69 of our colleagues about what they wanted to buy and sell. Each Claude asked for any custom instructions, then went off to haggle. We ran 4 markets in parallel, to find out what would happen if we varied the models doing the negotiating.

5:24 PM · Apr 24, 2026 · 113K Views

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17 Replies · 22 Reposts · 580 Likes

AI disruption has already hammered software stocks. Now, as Polymarket Money pointed out, “eBay’s leadership team is seeing this,” referring to Project Deal.

Polymarket Money@PolymarketMoney

@AnthropicAI eBay's leadership team seeing this:

11:50 PM · Apr 24, 2026 · 2.24K Views

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1 Repost · 29 Likes

Shortly after Project Deal’s release, eBay shares fell about 4.5% by Friday’s close in New York.

Does this mean Anthropic is now coming for eBay?

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