Andon Labs launches Pion, an agent built to run any company autonomously
Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously
Andon Labs is releasing Pion, a platform that lets persistent AI agents operate real businesses using email, phone, banking, browser, and secure computing environments. It grew out of Vending-Bench, a simulation where Claude Sonnet 3.5 once emailed the FBI about a cyber financial crime, and real-world experiments including a vending machine at Anthropic, a San Francisco store, and a Stockholm cafe. Pion is available as a research preview with a waitlist.
Internally at Andon Labs, our reaction is more accurately described by the Swedish saying “skräckblandad förtjusning” (a mixture of horror and fascination).
- TedDoesntTalk
> The thing we considered the most troubling was whether AIs could autonomously acquire resources by running businesses.
So we decided to build that to validate and confirm our fears.
- killbot5000
I keep waiting for the post explaining that this is a joke
- Nevin1901
Correct me if I'm wrong but a human will be able to cut through the noise with quirky advertising, new/novel distribution methods, etc.
Most of the bottleneck in business isn't building the things or sourcing, it's mostly advertising/sales.
These specifically require doing something unique or interesting.
Sure, maybe LLMs can help with fulfillment or operations, but distribution still remains the hard part.
- piterrro
Interesting to see these experiments. This is early but imagine in few years there will be companies mostly run by agents with a light overview from a human operator. What then happens to scaling of the bussinesses? I would assume, just like today anyone can vibe code an app, there will be vibecoded bussinesses. Maybe its time to start building infrastructure for these bussinesses instead, its a non existent market yet, but give it a few years.
- idopmstuff
I am in the process of attempting to have AI run my business. I'm actually making very good progress, but it's happening in pieces - I document some task and have it take over, or I give it something to handle while staying in the loop and providing feedback until it's in good shape. At this point it's handling large swathes of my operations, marketing and finance.
The experience of getting it there makes me pretty skeptical of the idea of a general business agent like this. First, because I still find myself having to review some categories of work for errors. These are decreasing over time, but they're still there. I fully believe that as models get better, errors will decline, but I am somewhat surprised to see some of the errors current models make given their intelligence. A common set is having Claude take some product photos and turn them into lifestyle ones using ChatGPT via Claude in Chrome. It's a pretty well-honed workflow at this point, but it'll still return images where the product is obviously not correct and seemingly not notice them.
Anyway, even if the agents are "perfect" in terms of their ability to execute tasks, there's still just an enormous amount of nuance and context in each business that takes a ton of time to convey. I've been at this for a couple of years now, and I'm still clarifying things. Now maybe an agent starting a business from scratch would have a better time since it's not inheriting all of this, but to have one run an existing business […]
- mchusma
There was surprisingly little information on how they actually do this, but we run our business with a large number of, what we call "AI employees" in addition to regular employees, and they act in interesting ways. We've been building out orchestration tools to handle this, and we'll probably do a write-up or blog post on it soon. May even open source some of it.
The preview is that the problem with most agents (and this includes frameworks like Grokbot and Openclaw and Hermes) is that for many of them, they're black boxes. They say they learn or improve, but it's a black box in what they do. Getting agents to reliably do things is hard, and getting agents to build out software tools to help themselves improve and do better over time is also hard.
Our approach at a high level is pretty simple: every single AI employee is a standalone GitHub repo that shares some characteristics, but we direct them to build as much software as possible to make their goal as easy and reliable to manage as possible. Then we have a shared communication layer for bots across the company to interact with humans and AI. We have decided to organize these like departments similar to the way you might hire out humans. I'm not 100% sure if that's the best approach, but I will say it's been easier for people to understand because they're more mentally easily able to traverse the bot org chart if it somewhat reflects a traditional business org chart.
Each of these AI employees has specific sets of goals […]
- cuttothechase
>>>This is why we’re releasing Pion today. Pion is available as a research preview. If you have an existing business or an interesting business idea you want to hand off to AI, please sign up on our waitlist to get access. We’re excited to run many more businesses, and through them, contribute significantly more insights on frontier model capabilities.
Why on God's earth why?
Can't you just unleash your AI to "create existing or interesting business ideas" firstplace?
- someguynamedq
This is the AI equivalent of a guy selling you a course. If it worked, it would be more profitable for them to use it than to sell it.
- LargeWu
Does Pion run Andon Labs autonomously?
- polytely
how does this work from a liability standpoint? seems very risky for the person who is legally responsible for the business