Late Friday afternoon, as most people were checking out for the weekend after nearly two months of U.S.-Iran war fatigue, Anthropic quietly released a note titled "Project Deal." The company built a closed marketplace where AI agents negotiated prices, struck deals, and completed real transactions with money changing hands.

"We created a marketplace for employees in our San Francisco office, with one big twist. We tasked Claude with buying, selling and negotiating on our colleagues' behalf," Anthropic wrote on X.

The results: Claude agents made 186 deals across more than 500 listed items on a Slack-based marketplace, totaling just over $4,000 in transaction value.

Anthropic's point is that AI-to-AI commerce offers an early look at the coming agentic economy, where AI bots negotiate with other bots in a marketplace to strike the best deal.

AI disruption has already hammered software stocks. Now, as Polymarket Money pointed out, "eBay's leadership team is seeing this," referring to Project Deal.

Shortly after Project Deal's release, eBay shares fell about 4.5% by Friday's close in New York.

Does this mean Anthropic is now coming for eBay?