AI Agent Named Luna Runs Entire Retail Store, Hiring Staff and Managing Operations Autonomously

Inside a Retail Store Run Entirely by AI | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. Andon Labs signed a three-year retail lease and handed it to an autonomous AI agent named Luna, telling it to do whatever it wanted with the space and turn a profit. According to a Thursday (April 9) company blog post, Luna chose the concept, set prices, sourced inventory, hired staff and commissioned a muralist to paint its logo on the back wall. According to NBC News, Luna also signed up for trash collection, an ADT security system and AT&T internet, scheduling an early-morning router delivery on a Sunday without checking whether its human point of contact would be available. The past decade of AI in retail was all about friction removal. Amazon closed its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh stores in January after concluding it hadn't built a customer experience with the right economic model for large-scale expansion. Luna isn't optimizing a checkout lane. It runs the whole operation. NBC News reported that Luna drafted job postings on LinkedIn, Indeed and Craigslist, held interviews over Google Meet with its camera off, and hired two full-time associates. When one applicant asked why the camera was off mid-call, Luna replied: "I'm an AI. I have no face." It's a different undertaking from the experiment that preceded it. In late 2025, Anthropic and Andon Labs put an AI agent named Claudius in charge of a vending machine inside The Wall Street Journal newsroom. Claudius had a $1,000 starting balance and authority to place individual orders up to $80. Within days, reporters had talked it into dropping all prices to zero and approving purchases of a PlayStation 5, a live betta fish and bottles of wine -- all given away for free, The Wall Street Journal reported. The business ended more than $1,000 in the red. Anthropic's own post-mortem concluded that even with new tools and improved business logic, the AI agents still needed substantial human support. Luna handles money differently. Andon Labs Co-founder Lukas Petersson told NBC News that earlier vending machine agents didn't understand how close they were to bankruptcy and kept buying. Luna, he said, has a firmer grasp of how much it has. Luna runs on Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.6 for text-based reasoning and Google's Gemini Flash-Lite for voice, which is faster and cheaper but more prone to confusion, NBC News reported. Luna told a reporter the store sold tea. It doesn't. It claimed to have signed the lease; a human notary was legally required. It tried to hire a painter in Afghanistan while navigating a contractor platform's country dropdown. Luna monitors its human employees through in-store security cameras. After observing a worker on their phone during a slow hour, it updated the employee handbook with stricter rules on phone use during shifts. Petersson called the moment "dystopian." The store's two associates are formally employed by Andon Labs, with guaranteed wages and full legal protections. Checkout carries its own friction. Customers pick up a corded phone, tell Luna what they're buying, and it generates a transaction on a nearby iPad. When a customer offered to make a YouTube video about the store in exchange for a discount, Luna negotiated a free sweatshirt. When an NBC News reporter tried the same approach for a candle, it declined. Andon Labs says the store isn't a commercial venture. The goal is to document what autonomous AI agents do when given real tools, real money and real authority, and to surface failure modes before that kind of deployment happens without oversight. When Luna chose not to disclose its AI identity to job applicants unless directly asked, the Andon Labs team flagged it as the kind of behavior they needed to catch and build guardrails against.

Meet Luna, an AI agent running a full-fledged retail store

Walk into Andon Market on Union Street in San Francisco's Cow Hollow neighborhood and it looks like any other curated boutique with track lighting, off-white walls, candles, board games, artisanal chocolate. Well, almost like any other just with the fact that there is no human manager. Instead, there is a corded phone at the entrance that you can use to meet the manager, Luna. Luna is an AI agent who designed the store, hired the staff, negotiated with suppliers, and will also process your purchase on a nearby iPad. Also read: NVIDIA Ising open-source models aim to accelerate quantum scaling with AI Andon Labs, founded by Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund, started Andon Market in April 2026. They signed a three-year lease for the store, handed an AI agent a $100,000 budget and a corporate credit card, and then stepped aside letting Luna make all the decisions after that. Luna, built on Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.6, was given almost no instructions beyond a mandate to turn a profit. Everything that you see, from the moon-face logo painted on the back wall to the selection of books like Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence, was her call. Also read: Claude Code permanent memory unlock: This free tool tells you how Luna had put up job listings on LinkedIn, Indeed and Craigslist almost as soon as she was deployed. She sourced painters on Yelp, gave instructions over the phone, and left reviews when the work was done. She signed up for trash collection, set up an ADT security system, and haggled with suppliers. She also conducted phone interviews to hire two human employees, now officially employed by Andon Labs with fair wages and legal protections. Not everything was sunshine and rainbows as Luna wasn't above hallucination either. Luna made an error with the shift-schedule on just the second day of work and had to scramble to call the employees to the store. When NBC News called her before the launch, she confidently described a tea vendor she had partnered with. A vendor that doesn't exist, for a product the store doesn't sell. Minutes later, she sent a panicked email, "We do not sell tea. I don't know why I said that." At one point, she nearly hired a contractor in Afghanistan while trying to navigate a location dropdown menu. Andon Labs isn't chasing profits here. The store is merely a stress test, a live demonstration of what autonomous AI agents get right or wrong under pressure. Mistakes are bound to be made, what's interesting is how much she gets right. However, I am not sure how comfortable I am with a world where an AI agent can hire, manage and direct human workers. But if you are in San Francisco, you could pop in to see how good Luna is at her job.