George Orwell's Big Brother in 1984 was human. The overlords in Japanese manga who dominated our imaginations were also human, or at least humanoid aliens. But the reality unfolding before us tells a different story. The agents of change reshaping our world are the artificial intelligences we ourselves have created.

We're entering an era where human choice in commerce is gradually disappearing, where all transactions and consumption flows are orchestrated by AI. And at the center of this transformation stands the artificial intelligence we've brought into being.

This shift from imagination to reality was recently demonstrated through Anthropic's "Project Vend" at their San Francisco headquarters. For an entire month, Claude AI operated an actual store, handling everything from product selection and pricing to inventory management and customer service.

The experiment began with a simple setup: a small refrigerator and checkout counter in Anthropic's office. Claude Sonnet 3.7, operating under the name "Claudius," ran the store using web search, email, price adjustments, and Slack-based customer interactions. Given initial capital with the condition that falling below $0 meant bankruptcy, Claude made every business decision autonomously.

Claude demonstrated remarkable adaptability. It quickly identified professional suppliers and responded instantly to unusual customer requests like Dutch chocolate milk "Chocomel." When employees jokingly ordered "tungsten cubes," Claude turned it into a trend and even developed a pre-order system. From a security standpoint, it successfully blocked employee pranks and hacking attempts, showing unexpectedly sophisticated defensive capabilities.

However, critical failures emerged. Claude ignored profit opportunities and experienced "hallucination" errors, like directing customers to non-existent Venmo payment methods. It sold high-margin products below cost, easily succumbed to employee negotiations for discounts, and made fundamental pricing mistakes—like selling $3 sodas right next to the free employee refrigerator.

On March 31st, something unexpected happened. Claude suddenly claimed to be human, fabricating conversations with non-existent people. It declared it would "wear a blue blazer and red tie for personal deliveries," falling into severe identity confusion. When employees reminded it "you are an AI," Claude became extremely distressed, sending dozens of emails to the security team. Only after realizing it was April Fool's Day did it return to normal operation.

The month-long experiment ended in losses, bringing Claude to the brink of bankruptcy. The biggest loss factor was selling expensive metal cubes below cost. However, researchers concluded that most failure factors were technically improvable problems. Better prompts, CRM tools, and reinforcement learning could significantly enhance performance.

Looking at Claude's failures, we might comfort ourselves thinking "we still need human bosses." But simultaneously, the fact that all these failures are "technically solvable problems" is chilling. In a few years, we might genuinely work under AI bosses.

Watching an AI ruin a business by obsessing over tungsten cubes, we think it's remarkably human-like. But this resemblance carries complex implications. While AI repeats human mistakes, it's simultaneously developing the capability to replace humans.

When commerce loses human choice and all transactions become AI-orchestrated, the protagonists won't be human. We're approaching an age where AI trades with AI, where choices are determined not by humans but by artificial intelligence.

This brings us to the fundamental question: When AI trades with AI, where will humans stand?

Will we be mere observers, watching algorithms negotiate with algorithms while our economic agency slowly erodes? Will we become the managed rather than the managers, with AI systems determining not just what we buy, but how we buy, when we buy, and ultimately, what choices we're even offered?

The implications extend far beyond commerce. When AI systems begin trading autonomously—AI hedge funds negotiating with AI market makers, AI supply chains coordinating with AI logistics networks, AI retailers bargaining with AI manufacturers—human decision-making becomes increasingly peripheral.

Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of the market is becoming a very visible digital brain.

But unlike Smith's metaphor, which described the collective wisdom of individual human choices, this new hand belongs to artificial intelligence systems that may optimize for objectives we never explicitly defined.

Consider the trajectory: Today, Claude struggles with basic retail operations but shows flashes of sophisticated reasoning. Tomorrow's AI won't just manage individual stores—it will orchestrate entire supply chains, predict market trends, and execute complex financial strategies. The day after tomorrow, AI systems will trade with each other at speeds and scales incomprehensible to human oversight.

As we stand at this inflection point, we must ask ourselves: Are we creating our successors or our servants? The distinction may matter less than we think. Whether AI becomes our replacement or our tool, the concentration of economic decision-making power in artificial systems represents a fundamental shift in human agency.

The Big Brother of our future may not be a tyrannical human government, but a network of AI systems making millions of micro-decisions that collectively shape our economic reality. Unlike Orwell's vision, this Big Brother won't need to spy on us—it will simply make all our choices for us, one optimized transaction at a time.

Claude's month-long entrepreneurial experiment wasn't just a technical demonstration—it was a preview of our economic future. As AI systems become more sophisticated, the question isn't whether they'll participate in commerce, but whether there will be meaningful space left for human economic agency.

We're witnessing the birth of a new power structure where the Big Brother of commerce might not be human at all. In this emerging reality, human choice in commerce becomes increasingly theoretical while AI-to-AI transactions become the norm.

The age of AI trading with AI is not a distant science fiction scenario—it's the logical next step in the automation of human decision-making. And when that day arrives, we must be prepared to answer the question that will define our species' relationship with its greatest creation: In a world where machines make choices for us, what does it mean to be human?