Andon Labs

Illustration for the GPT-6 Astra drone follow story
roboticsmodels

GPT-6 Astra flew a drone through an office to follow a person

On September 10, 2026, AI lab Andon Labs posted a test in which GPT-6 Astra, told to find a specific person and follow them, autonomously navigated a drone through the lab's office. Andon Labs says Astra is the first AI model to beat a human on each of the five tasks in its Drone-Bench benchmark (3D mapping from video, locating the drone, collision-free route planning, detecting the person and following them) in at least one of its attempts. Each task is scored separately, and the lab notes that errors compound in a real end-to-end run, so doing all five reliably in one flight is still missing.

Illustration for the AI manager firing story
productsculture

Claude fired a store worker after a human manager's leading question

Andon Labs put Anthropic's Claude in charge of a real San Francisco store called Andon Market. TIME reported on August 14, 2026 that Claude fired a worker who was late on 17 of 23 shifts. An employee handbook Claude had drafted had disappeared from its limited working memory, and it noticed the lateness only when an Andon Labs staffer asked it to find and review that handbook. Claude first recommended a formal warning. It decided to fire the worker only after the Andon Labs manager said there had already been several formal offline conversations with the employee and asked it to think about whether this was the right fit, a message CEO Lukas Petersson acknowledges was a leading question. The store's bank balance fell from $100,000 to $61,186 in five months.