21 August 2026
AI agent running San Francisco store fires employee for first time
First reported
The Algorithm ran this on , 2 days before the next source picked it up.
- Luna, an AI system running Andon Market in San Francisco since April, recommended firing an employee after researchers prompted her to review documented policy violations including repeated tardiness and unauthorized card use.
- When researchers replayed the firing scenario across seven different AI models, more capable models recommended termination consistently while weaker ones hesitated, suggesting decision-making varies significantly by model ability.
- Andon Labs, which operates the market as an experiment, notes current AI agents struggle with long-term memory retention and rarely act on their own initiative without direct human instruction.
How it was covered
The AlgorithmMIT Technology Review
Biotech companies like Insilico Medicine use AI to discover drugs but must name only humans as inventors on patents, since US law defines inventors as individuals and machines cannot legally be inventors. Legal experts debate whether this framework will adequately protect AI-generated drugs and encourage innovation, with some worried that excluding AI from inventorship could dampen future development.
Reported by The Decoder