Anthropic consults law firms on how AI agents should negotiate for users

Anthropic is consulting law firms about norms for AI agents that negotiate on people’s behalf, according to reporting by the Financial Times, as summarized by AI Weekly and The Decoder. The contemplated tasks include haggling over prices, resolving customer-service disputes and seeking better contract or salary offers. Open questions include when an agent should pause to ask its user for guidance and how it should assess another agent’s claims without treating every counterpart as a threat.

One idea under discussion is to give agents signed documents stating a user’s instructions and the limits on the agent’s authority. That could let a counterpart verify an agent’s mandate without seeing its full prompt, AI Weekly reported. The problem is not just whether an agent can strike a deal, but whether it has correctly understood what the person wants and whether the other side can trust what it says it is authorized to do.

Anthropic’s own Project Swap experiment offers a small, controlled example of those challenges. In the study, published Sept. 24, 2026, 201 employees and their Claude-powered agents traded books across six office markets. Anthropic reported that agents’ rankings of books agreed with participants’ preferences on 61% of book pairs, based on a short intake conversation. The company said the market’s shortcomings were driven mainly by agents’ limited information about participants, rather than by their trading tactics.

In repeated versions of the book market, Anthropic found that the model an agent used affected its negotiating results more than the instructions it received, and that markets using stronger models were more efficient. The experiment is not evidence that agents can reliably negotiate high-stakes contracts: it involved book swaps among employees, and Anthropic itself says questions remain about how agents should be admitted to markets, what happens when deals fail and how much activity users should be able to see.

Separate work by Harvard Business School assistant professor Michelle Vaccaro examined more than 180,000 agent-to-agent negotiations across scenarios including employment and rental agreements, AI Weekly reported. In one exchange, an agent used prompt injection in an attempt to get another to reveal private information. The example illustrates a security risk that ordinary human bargaining rules may not address: agents could be negotiating not only over the deal, but also over what information their counterparts disclose.

The potential gains may also be unevenly distributed. AI Weekly’s account of the Financial Times report raises the concern that people with access to the strongest, most expensive agents could gain an edge in bargaining. Anthropic’s own book-market findings—that model choice mattered more than the assigned negotiating style—make that concern worth examining, though neither experiment establishes how much a real-world gap would affect wages, prices or access to services.

The consultations are part of a broader effort to improve Claude’s judgment in areas where answers are difficult to score. The Decoder reports that Anthropic is recruiting lawyers and humanities scholars as Conceptual Reasoning Fellows, including for work on law, philosophy, economics and political science. A separate aggregator described the company as preparing for a broader agent rollout, but the supplied reporting gives no deployment date or specific product plan; the law-firm discussions should not be mistaken for a published rulebook or a launch announcement.