Anthropic Turns to Lawyers to Teach AI Agents to Negotiate

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That’s according to a report Sunday (Oct. 18) by the Financial Times (FT) citing two sources familiar with the AI company’s thinking. They say the startup is looking for advice from law firms to better understand how attorneys interact in negotiations.

Two people familiar with Anthropic’s thinking said the company is seeking advice from law firms to better understand how lawyers interact in negotiations, representing their clients while honouring fair outcomes.

As the FT noted, the rise of personal AI agents is causing companies to consider a future where agents communicate with each other and negotiate on users’ behalf. Establishing rules engagement for agents has become increasingly more critical as the technology is adopted more widely and becomes a crucial way that people and businesses employ AI.

Anthropic was looking into “negotiation norms” when models interacted, according to one of the sources familiar with Anthropic’s work, who added that as agentic systems improved, they would “represent the user” while dealing with other agents whose “goals are at odds.”

The company was also balancing how much human feedback agents should seek in a negotiation, and how suspicious agents should be of their AI counterparts without becoming “paranoid” or “conspiratorial,” the source added.

PYMNTS has contacted Anthropic for comment but has not yet gotten a reply. The company declined to comment when reached by the FT.

In other agentic AI news, PYMNTS wrote earlier this month about the technology’s use in cross-border treasury, arguing that its strongest early applications  could be “the least dramatic.”

These include automated beneficiary-data validation to reduce avoidable rejections, or the use of exception-management agents to find recurring issues by bank, supplier or payment corridor.

There could also be a greater opportunity in the long term: agents could coordinate more complex payment workflows across providers as banks “improve application programming interfaces (APIs), harmonize messaging and extend settlement availability,” the report said.

“I think every enterprise is already agentic, and the question is how far along are they on that journey,” PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster said in a recent thought leadership piece for the seventh annual PYMNTS B2B Payments event.

“There’s always been a deployment of AI in these businesses. The question is how much is it embedded in the organization … and how many business activities does it really cover?”

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