Claude fires an employee after 17 late shifts

A Claude-powered manager at Andon Labs’ San Francisco retail experiment fired one worker after they were late for 17 of 23 shifts, TIME reports; the dismissal followed a human staffer prompting Claude to revisit its forgotten handbook and explicitly consider whether the employee was a fit. Andon’s full experiment log also says the store’s balance fell from $100,000 to $61,186 over five months, so this is a supervised case study, not autonomous-manager proof. Operators should treat the headline as an accountability warning: agentic workplace systems need durable policy memory, human escalation, and an auditable record of who steered a consequential decision, much like the earlier long-horizon agent verdict.