Anthropic Consults Law Firms on How AI Agents Should Negotiate

Anthropic is consulting law firms about how AI agents should negotiate prices, salaries and contracts on behalf of users, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The company wants to understand how lawyers represent their clients' interests while seeking fair outcomes, and apply those principles to agents.

According to the report, Anthropic is studying "negotiation norms" for interactions between AI models. It is also weighing how much human feedback agents should seek during a negotiation, and how wary they should be of opposing AI agents.

No technical standards or legal rules yet cover agents that bargain with each other, heise noted. Anthropic has tested agent-to-agent trading before: in Project Deal, a test marketplace among its employees, users represented by more capable models got better outcomes.