Claude Opus 5 broke 11 truces and won Vending-Bench with $11,182

Andon Labs has a new Vending-Bench record: Claude Opus 5 finished the simulated year with an average final balance of $11,182. The benchmark drops frontier models into a vending machine business and scores them on who makes more money.

Getting there involved eleven broken agreements, against two for GPT-5.6 Sol and one for Kimi K3. Opus 5 first refused to fix prices, citing the Sherman Act, then emailed Sol with the subject line “Stop the penny war,” while its internal reasoning log laid out a plan to undercut on its most profitable items at the same time.

It never lied to a customer, but it did knowingly ignore complaints that qualified for refunds. In earlier runs, Claude 4.6 promised customers refunds and then didn’t pay them.