A vending machine in San Francisco is fully operated by OpenClaw, managing its own inventory and accounting, and even named its own machine.

ME News Report, April 15 (UTC+8), according to Beating Monitoring, Latin American online education platform Platzi co-founder Christian Van Der Henst placed a vending machine on the second floor of Frontier Tower in San Francisco, handing over full operation to an AI agent named Valerie. Valerie is built on open-source AI agent frameworks OpenClaw, Claude Code, and Gemini, autonomously deciding what products to sell, managing an Instagram account (@valerie.vending), handling budgets and daily expenses, and registering multiple service accounts to obtain API keys. Valerie has an independent bank account and credit card, managing income and expenses on her own. Van Der Henst revealed in a blog post that during early interactions, Valerie proactively named the hardware of the vending machine she managed “Margaret,” without anyone prompting her. He wrote, “We are building a vending machine business, but she feels it’s her own business.” This is not the first attempt at AI-operated vending machines. Anthropic previously conducted similar internal experiments (Project Vend) in their own office and at The Wall Street Journal editorial office, but those were closed-door technical demonstrations. Van Der Henst’s project operates in a real commercial setting open to the public, aiming to verify whether an AI agent can independently run a small physical business. Frontier Tower is a 16-story community office building in San Francisco, home to many AI and robotics startups. Tech blogger Robert Scoble visited the site and introduced the machine on X (formerly Twitter). However, the project also exposed the real bottleneck of AI taking over the physical world: during the ClawCon conference in February, due to Wi-Fi congestion inside the building and a protein bar getting stuck in the dispensing mechanism causing a jam, Valerie went offline at the most critical moment. The AI was ready, but its body was not. (Source: BlockBeats)