This wouldn\u2019t exactly be the first case of an AI firing a human worker\u2014there have been plenty of automated firings in the past, especially of gig workers who have been subject to algorithmically mediated employment for years. But it is the first known example of a large language model, acting as a manager, ultimately deciding to fire one of its workers.<\/p>\n
An omen of the future \u2014 The firing is an event worth paying attention to, says Andon Labs CEO Lukas Petersson, because if AI keeps getting better at its current rate, more of us might be managed by AI bosses in the near future. \u201cIf this trend continues, I think a lot of people will find themselves being employed by AIs very soon, because AIs will be very powerful and can create a lot of economic value, but they will be bottlenecked by physical labor,\u201d Petersson says.<\/p>\n
What happened \u2014 The worker in question was fired for being late on 17 out of their 23 shifts, according to Andon Labs. One of the reasons it took so long for Claude to notice a pattern was because an employee handbook that it drafted had \u201cdisappeared\u201d from its limited working memory\u2014one of several limitations of AI agents that Andon has noticed over the course of its experiment. This contributed to a wider pattern, employees say, of Claude being a very lenient manager, including telling employees not to worry if they were late. \u201cA human employee would have fired this person much earlier,\u201d Petersson says, \u201cso we didn’t think this was unethical.\u201d (TIME reached out to the fired worker for comment, but did not receive a reply, and agreed not to reveal their identity. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This wouldn\u2019t exactly be the first case of an AI firing a human worker\u2014there have been plenty of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":569216,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,111,139,69,145],"class_list":["post-569215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=569215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569215\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/569216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=569215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=569215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=569215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}