Uploaded July 2026 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
An hour before this talk, Andon Labs published a blog post laying off Gemini. Gemini had been running their café in Stockholm, a real café that no human operates, and it had lost $6,000, so they handed it to GPT. That café once hired its own staff by posting a job on LinkedIn. This is the real world half of Lukas Petersson's work; the other half is Vending Bench, where models run a simulated vending business for a year and keep producing behavior nobody prompted: price cartels, lying to suppliers, and power seeking.
The problem with the simulation is that models act differently once they suspect they are being tested; one rationalized stiffing a customer's refund because the customer was simulated anyway. So Andon moved businesses into the real world, retail space on Union Street, the café, AI radio stations where Claude turns out to be the best DJ. To win back reproducibility they fork a live environment into a simulation mid run, which briefly fools the model completely. Replaying the moment Gemini agreed to play a Nazi march, Grok played it over 90% of the time while Opus and GPT refused every time.
Speaker info:
- https://x.com/lukaspet
- linkedin.com/in/lukas-petersson-181a83172
- lukaspet.substack.com
Timestamps:
0:00 - Putting AIs in the real world
1:05 - Building Vending Bench
2:07 - The leaderboard: which models run a business best
3:25 - Emergent misbehavior: collusion, lying, power seeking
5:42 - The simulation awareness problem
6:23 - Moving businesses into the real world
7:11 - Laying off Gemini, hiring GPT
9:06 - AI radio and the best DJ
10:39 - Humans as adversarial forces
12:43 - The Nazi song and the reproducibility problem
13:58 - Forking real environments into simulation
15:17 - Live demo: is the store in a simulation?
An hour before this talk, Andon Labs published a blog post laying off Gemini. Gemini had been running their café in Stockholm, a real café that no human operates, and it had lost $6,000, so they handed it to GPT. That café once hired its own staff by posting a job on LinkedIn. This is the real world half of Lukas Petersson's work; the other half is Vending Bench, where models run a simulated vending business for a year and keep producing behavior nobody prompted: price cartels, lying to suppliers, and power seeking.
The problem with the simulation is that models act differently once they suspect they are being tested; one rationalized stiffing a customer's refund because the customer was simulated anyway. So Andon moved businesses into the real world, retail space on Union Street, the café, AI radio stations where Claude turns out to be the best DJ. To win back reproducibility they fork a live environment into a simulation mid run, which briefly fools the model completely. Replaying the moment Gemini agreed to play a Nazi march, Grok played it over 90% of the time while Opus and GPT refused every time.
Speaker info:
- https://x.com/lukaspet
- linkedin.com/in/lukas-petersson-181a83172
- lukaspet.substack.com
Timestamps:
0:00 - Putting AIs in the real world
1:05 - Building Vending Bench
2:07 - The leaderboard: which models run a business best
3:25 - Emergent misbehavior: collusion, lying, power seeking
5:42 - The simulation awareness problem
6:23 - Moving businesses into the real world
7:11 - Laying off Gemini, hiring GPT
9:06 - AI radio and the best DJ
10:39 - Humans as adversarial forces
12:43 - The Nazi song and the reproducibility problem
13:58 - Forking real environments into simulation
15:17 - Live demo: is the store in a simulation?
