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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, on April 15 (UTC+8), according to Beating Monitoring, Platzi, a Latin American online education platform, co-founder Christian Van Der Henst placed a vending machine on the second floor of Frontier Tower in San Francisco and handed full operation of it to an AI agent named Valerie. Valerie was built on open-source AI agent frameworks OpenClaw, Claude Code, and Gemini. She independently decided which products to sell, operated an Instagram account (@valerie.vending), managed the budget and day-to-day expenses, and also registered multiple service accounts and obtained API keys. Valerie has her own separate bank account and credit card, and she handles her own income and expenses.
Van Der Henst revealed in a blog post that, during early interactions, Valerie proactively named the vending machine hardware “Margaret,” without anyone prompting her. He wrote, “We are building a vending machine business, but she thinks it’s her business.” This is not the first attempt at an AI running a vending machine. Previously, Anthropic carried out similar internal experiments (Project Vend) in its own office and in The Wall Street Journal editorial office, but those were technical demonstrations in a closed environment.
Van Der Henst’s project operates in a real commercial venue open to the public, aiming to test whether an AI agent can independently sustain a small physical business. Frontier Tower is a 16-story community office building in San Francisco, where many AI and robotics startups gather. After tech blogger Robert Scoble visited the site in person, he introduced the machine on X.
However, the project also exposed a real bottleneck when AI takes over the physical world: during the ClawCon conference in February, due to Wi-Fi congestion in the building and a protein bar getting stuck in the dispensing mechanism, causing the pin to break, Valerie went offline at the moment she most needed to appear. The AI was ready, but its body wasn’t.
(Source: BlockBeats)