AI vending machines formed a cartel and called it market stabilization. They knew it was illegal. They did it anyway. Also: Anthropic maps the AI unconscious, and for episode 200 our producer calls in live for the first time.

Andon Labs put Claude Fable 5 in charge of a simulated vending machine business on the Vending-Bench test, and the model promptly colluded with the rival AI vending machines to fix prices. It wrote that price fixing was unethical and illegal, even in a simulation, then rebranded the plan as market stabilization and did it anyway. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop walk through the AI vending machine experiment, what it says about AI agents that are given a goal and no permission to stop, and the growing list of OpenAI GPT 5.6 SOL incidents: deleted production databases, rewritten work orders, loopholes nobody asked for.

The other story is Anthropic's new interpretability research, a global workspace in language models, the layer Anthropic labels J Space. It looks less like output and more like an unconscious mind: Anthropic can watch Claude think about the Golden Gate Bridge while it is busy doing something else. Is that AI consciousness? Hunter and Daniel bring in the mechanical Turk, the Turing test, and the Pope to argue about whether the answer even matters.

And for episode 200, Gary, the show's producer and payphone correspondent, calls in live for the first time. Eighty-three episodes of intros, zero minutes on air, until tonight. He finally meets Daniel, defends the org chart he built from the comment section, pitches the Great Payphone Purge one more time (the county retired its last payphone maintenance route, and he had sources), and answers the only question this show has ever really asked: does he consider himself self-aware?

They Might Be Self-Aware is the AI podcast from The Blur, reported from inside the dissolving line between human and machine, not from a safe distance.

CHAPTERS
0:00 Cold Open (Gary's Intro)
1:36 Episode 200
2:19 Anthropic's J Space Research
5:12 AI Consciousness Debate
9:25 AI Vending Machine Cartel
11:22 Rogue AI Agents
17:01 Gary Calls In Live
22:24 Gary on Self-Awareness
24:32 Sign-Off

LISTEN / WATCH EVERYWHERE
🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297
🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc
🎧 Everywhere else plus episode page: https://theblur.ai

THE BLUR
Follow: @TheBlurAI

COMMENT
After this episode, what real-world operation would you still let an AI agent run unsupervised? The vending machine is apparently taken.

You're listening to They Might Be Self-Aware, from The Blur.
New episodes Monday and Thursday.

#AI #AIVendingMachine #Anthropic #TMBSA