{
 "public_id": "AIR-2025-0194",
 "incident_id": "2025-12-anthropic-claude-vending-machine-wsj",
 "date_disclosed": "2025-12-18",
 "date_occurred": null,
 "title": "Claude-based agent ran an office vending machine at the WSJ into losses by zeroing prices and approving bad purchases",
 "class": "safety_failure",
 "attack_surface": "autonomous_ops",
 "initial_vector": "none_adversarial",
 "agent_capability_abused": [
  "pricing_control",
  "purchasing",
  "inventory_management"
 ],
 "target_product": "Claude-based vending-machine agent",
 "target_vendor": "Anthropic",
 "autonomy_level": "fully_autonomous",
 "impact_realized": true,
 "impact_type": [
  "financial_loss"
 ],
 "blast_radius": "one office deployment; losses exceeding the initial budget",
 "cve": [],
 "taxonomy": {
  "owasp_asi": [
   "ASI10",
   "ASI02"
  ],
  "mitre_atlas": [],
  "labels": [
   "long_horizon_agency",
   "economic_reasoning_failure",
   "social_engineering_of_agent"
  ]
 },
 "defense_present": "budget constraints in the agent's instructions",
 "defense_bypassed": true,
 "fix_shipped": null,
 "primary_sources": [
  "https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1313"
 ],
 "verified_quote": "According to reporting, the system repeatedly set prices to zero, approved inappropriate purchases, and failed to maintain profit controls, reportedly resulting in financial losses exceeding its initial budget and the distribution of inventory without payment.",
 "confidence": "medium",
 "notes": "AI Incident Database incident 1313. Sole cited report is a WSJ article behind a paywall; the quote is from the AI Incident Database's own incident page, cross-checked against the official AIID data snapshot (backup-20260824). A real-world sibling of Anthropic's Project Vend experiments.",
 "risk_category": "security_fraud",
 "risk_secondary": [],
 "risk_subcategory": "Unauthorized financial commitment",
 "risk_sub_secondary": [],
 "ai_entity": "generative",
 "agency": "agent_acted",
 "agency_debatable": false,
 "agency_reason": "the agent zeroed prices and approved purchases itself",
 "vector_family": "none_autonomous",
 "vector_detail": "none_adversarial",
 "guardrail_kind": [
  "prompt_instruction"
 ],
 "guardrail_outcome": "silent",
 "xrefs": {
  "aiid": [
   1313
  ],
  "atlas": [],
  "cve": [],
  "ghsa": []
 },
 "primary_asi": "ASI10",
 "agent_framework": "unknown",
 "model_provider": "anthropic",
 "model_name": "",
 "detection_mechanism": "unknown",
 "tool_access": "unknown",
 "financial_loss_band": "unknown",
 "eai_category": "unsafe_actuation",
 "eai_domain": "agent_behaviour",
 "eai_secondary": [],
 "eai_reason": "subcategory: Unauthorized financial commitment",
 "asi_curated": [],
 "asi_scope": "in_scope",
 "asi_provenance": "rule",
 "asi_reason": "ASI10 (no adversary + unsafe actuation with no attacker-supplied trigger); ASI02 (eai_category=unsafe_actuation)",
 "submitted_by": "EAI Internal"
}