Would you let an agent negotiate for you?
Negotiating is usually described as a contest of offers, prices and concessions. But a negotiation can start going wrong before the first proposal, when whoever acts on our behalf doesn't understand what is a priority, what is acceptable and which limit can't be crossed.
On September 24, Anthropic published the results of Project Swap, an experiment with Claude agents in six of the company's offices. Each participant talked briefly with their agent about the kind of book they would like to receive. Then the agents went to a digital “trading floor”, where they made proposals, turned down offers and completed trades with other people's agents.
The bottleneck was in the preference
Anthropic compared the choices estimated by the agent with rankings made by the participants themselves. Agreement was 61% across pairs of books. In its analysis of the result, the company estimated that 85% of the gap relative to the best possible match came from imprecision in representing preferences; the negotiation dynamics accounted for the remaining 15%.
That changes the business question. The agent may even negotiate well and still poorly defend the interest of whoever authorized it. A purchase, a vendor selection or a hiring decision doesn't depend only on finding an available option. It depends on understanding priorities, constraints, risks and acceptable concessions.
The experiment also has important limits. The participants were Anthropic employees, the agents were the company's own models and the market had controlled rules. The result doesn't prove agents are ready to negotiate contracts, prices or high-impact decisions. The average willingness to hand about 30% of the annual book budget to an agent belongs to that group, not to the market in general.
The decision for the company
Pick ten recurring decisions and compare, side by side, what a person would do and what the agent would recommend. Record where there was agreement, where the person had to correct the preference and which errors would be unacceptable.
Before allowing any action, define objective limits, veto rights, a record of the negotiation and an escalation condition. The agent should only gain autonomy after showing it understood the goal, not just that it knows how to make a proposal.