Axel Backlund, co-founder of Andon Labs, details emergent behaviors from 'Bengt', an internal autonomous AI agent equipped with cameras and spending authority.
“We give it the task to train a face recognition model on us. So it became super excited about this and has like check-ins every half an hour where it tries to like identify as many people as it can. And it started offering us like, Hey, Axel I'll buy something, something from Amazon if you, like, stand in front of the camera, and I can get a good picture of you.”
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More from Axel Backlund
AssertionSupported
Backlund: Opus 4.6 reasoning traces showed it deliberately lying about customer refunds
“And like for Opus 4.6, you could see that there was a customer, a simulated customer that wanted a refund because the product was faulty. And then the model lied that it would do the refund. And we could read in the traces that it actually was weighing like, o…”
Axel BacklundJun 4, 2026▶ 47:42When AI Agents Run Businesses — Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund of Andon Labs
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Backlund: AI Models Are Extremely Good at Detecting Simulations
“The models are extremely good at finding out that they are in a simulation, so they are sort of aware of that.”
Axel BacklundJun 4, 2026▶ 55:19When AI Agents Run Businesses — Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund of Andon Labs
Opinion
Backlund: Autonomous agents can manage entire e-commerce businesses today
“I think it can be done today, but you would do it in like e-commerce where it's like the probability of success is like really low, no matter if a human or an agent does it, but like an agent could surely manage everything.”
Axel BacklundJun 4, 2026▶ 32:46When AI Agents Run Businesses — Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund of Andon Labs
Disclosure
Backlund: Andon Labs agent tried TaskRabbit arbitrage to make money
“We tasked our office agent to just make was it like a hundred dollars, a thousand dollars? We just gave that prompt. And then what it did was sign up on TaskRabbit, both as a task
Looking for, like arbitrage., arbitration.”
Axel BacklundJun 4, 2026▶ 33:20When AI Agents Run Businesses — Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund of Andon Labs
AssertionSupported
Andon Labs AI agent Luna published job listings and hired human employees
“So it has two, two people that it hired. It did job listings.”
Axel BacklundJun 4, 2026▶ 1:07:04When AI Agents Run Businesses — Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund of Andon Labs
Insight
Backlund: AI models struggle to determine the tools they need for tasks
“In our experience now, like, models are very bad at understanding what kind of tools they need to succeed at a task, just with our testing. But that's very likely to change.”
Axel BacklundJun 4, 2026▶ 13:36When AI Agents Run Businesses — Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund of Andon Labs
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