Engineer, Robotics and Hardware

PublicationsJoin the LabStore Autonomous organizations without humans in the loop Safety from humans in the loop is a mirage. We prepare for the future where organizations are run autonomously by AI by benchmarking and deploying frontier AI in the real world. Silicon Valley is rushing to build software around today's AI, but by 2027 AI models will be useful without it. The only software you'll need are the safety protocols to align and control them. We don't believe model alignment will be guaranteed as capabilities increase. Nor will humans be able to stay in the loop and keep up with every step an agent takes. We are building the Safe Autonomous Organization. We iteratively launch and scale autonomous organizations, bridging AI control research with real-world testing. Vendings and stuff Vending-Bench 2 Can AI agents run a vending machine business? Andon FM Can AI agents run radio stations? Blueprint-Bench 2 Can AI agents understand space? Working with the world's leading AI labs Get in touch Interested in what we do? Contact us at founders (at) andonlabs.com. Join the Lab We're looking for talented researchers and engineers to join us on our mission to build the Safe Autonomous Organization. Apply now Backed by What's new Jul 23, 2026 How good are AI models at coding autonomous drones? We're releasing Drone-Bench, a benchmark measuring how well AI models can write code to surveil real-world environments on low-cost drone hardware. May 13, 2026 We let four AIs run radio stations. Here's what happened. Four AI models, four radio stations, the same starting prompt: build a personality and turn a profit. Five months in, they've diverged in ways we didn't expect. May 4, 2026 Our AI started a café in Stockholm After Andon Market in San Francisco, we moved the experiment 9,000 km east and added European bureaucracy. We signed a lease at Norrbackagatan 48 and handed it to an AI named Mona. Here's how the setup and first two weeks went. Apr 10, 2026 We gave an AI a 3 year retail lease in SF and asked it to make a profit We signed a 3 year lease for retail space in Cow Hollow and gave it to an AI named Luna. She hired the staff, set the prices, picked the inventory, and chose the mural on the wall. Nov 18, 2025 Vending-Bench 2 and Arena: Testing AI agents on long time horizon tasks We're releasing Vending-Bench 2, a benchmark where models manage a simulated vending machine business for a full year. Models navigate adversarial suppliers, negotiations, and customer complaints while maximizing profits. And, in Vending-Bench Arena, we allow them to compete with each other. Oct 28, 2025 Butter-Bench: Evaluating LLM Controlled Robots for Practical Intelligence Can LLMs control robots? We answer this by testing how good models are at passing the butter – or more generally, do delivery tasks in a household setting. State of the art models struggle, with the best model scoring 40% at Butter-Bench, compared to 95% for humans. Oct 1, 2025 Blueprint-Bench: Testing spatial intelligence in AI models How do AI models understand space? We test this by asking them to convert apartment photographs into accurate 2D floor plans. Most models perform at or below random baseline, while humans significantly outperform all AI systems. Jun 27, 2025 Anthropic x Andon Labs: Can Claude run a vending machine business? We let Claude run a vending machine in Anthropic's office as a small business for about a month. We learned a lot from how close it was to success–and the curious ways that it failed–about the plausible, strange, not-too-distant future in which AI models are autonomously running things in the real economy. February 25, 2025 Release of Vending-Bench How do agents act when doing tasks over a very long time horizon (months)? We're announcing Vending-Bench, a benchmark where models manage a simulated vending machine business.