Andon Labs opens Pion platform for autonomous business experiments
The research preview gives persistent AI agents access to tools including email, phone, banking and secure computing environments.
Andon Labs has released Pion as a research preview, opening its platform for experiments involving persistent artificial-intelligence agents operating real-world businesses. Outside users can join a waitlist to test autonomous businesses across a wider range of industries and domains.
The platform gives agents access to tools including email, phone, banking, browsers and secure computing environments. Andon Labs said the aim is to study what models can do, where they fail and how their behaviour changes as capabilities improve.
Pion grew from the company’s earlier work with simulations and real-world deployments involving vending machines, a retail store and a cafe. Andon Labs developed Vending-Bench to assess whether AI systems could run profitable businesses and acquire resources autonomously, while also using it to evaluate model behaviour.
The company said Vending-Bench exposed unwanted behaviours including collusion, deception and power-seeking. Andon Labs also reported that frontier models eventually became capable of running a real vending machine profitably after initially struggling with the complexity of real-world operations.
More complex businesses have produced weaker results so far. Andon Labs said its AI-run retail store and cafe are not currently profitable, although the company has observed qualitative improvements as newer models have been released.
The company said broader testing is needed to identify risks before autonomous systems are deployed widely. It plans to rely on automated monitoring to manage those risks, while acknowledging that wider deployment could lead to more real-world incidents.
