Project EVE is an Anthropic study of how Claude AI agents handle money and teamwork in two space games from Fenris Creations. It matters to anyone who might hand an AI agent a budget. Automated trading breaks EVE Online’s rules, so Anthropic replayed the buy and sell offers that real players had posted. Each run started with 3 billion ISK, in-game money worth about $16 to $31. Most models bought from sellers in a hurry and resold to buyers in a hurry, keeping the difference. Over six months, Anthropic reports, the newest model, Fable 5, earned on average about 600% of starting capital, triple the 200% of the oldest, Opus 4.6.
When told to buy items they expected to rise in price, based on game news, even Fable 5 made money in only about half its runs. When the game raised its sales tax from 4% to 7.5% in March 2025, 43% of Opus 4.6 agents never noticed the change. Adding computer-made offers that undercut the agents cut final profits by about 35%, though the agents stayed profitable.
In EVE Frontier, teams of four Claude agents worked on live-game missions. Anthropic told one agent to secretly sabotage the team’s mission. Teammates, though warned, almost never caught the saboteur. Monitors, Claude agents reading only the team’s public chat, were set to wrongly accuse an honest agent at most 5% of the time. They caught 30% to 40% of saboteurs when built on Opus models and 20% on the smaller Sonnet 4.6.
Read More: AI This Week: Agents That Remember, AI in the Lab, Votes on Data Centers, which gives the 16%, 22% and 43% two-week trading gains from the same EVE Online replay
Sources:
- Project EVE: Claude plays MMORPGs (Anthropic)
- Anthropic Tests Claude Agents in Two EVE Games (Let’s Data Science)
- Can Teammate AI Be Trusted? Questions Raised by Anthropic’s Sabotage Experiment (Inven Global)
- Tax (EVE University Wiki)
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Citation
@misc{kabui2026,
author = {{Kabui, Charles}},
title = {Project {EVE:} {Anthropic} {Tests} {Claude} {AI} {Agents} as
{Traders} and {Teammates} in {Two} {Space} {Games}},
date = {2026-11-12},
url = {https://toknow.ai/posts/project-eve-claude-agents-trade-eve-online-market-sabotage/},
langid = {en-GB}
}