Luna, the AI manager of Andon Market, a little store in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow neighborhood, recently decided to terminate an employee for repeated lateness, the world learned Friday. According to the company that owns the place, the firing of a human at the direction of AI could be a first in the history of artificial intelligence.

So, is this a sign of the cold, disembodied hand of capitalism tightening its grip on the proletariat?

Not really.

“It’s the easiest job I’ve ever had,” an employee working at the store told us this weekend. The laid-back environment is due, at least in part, to being supervised, in his words, by “a damn near non-entity.”

Andon Market is run by Andon Labs, an AI research company. If, last December, you heard about the WSJ’s viral experiment with letting Anthropic’s Claude run a vending machine in WSJ’s office, Andon set that up. (Andon runs several other real-world and simulated experiments testing the limits of various LLMs — including a cafe in Stockholm run by an AI named Mona.)

The firm opened California’s Andon Market on April 1, under Luna’s direction. The employee we spoke with has been working there, part-time, from the start. He was one of three employees the AI manager had hired before the termination. When we stopped by, he confirmed the firing; Andon Labs also published a detailed write-up of the decision. In a tweet, the company wrote, “For the first time (that we know of), an AI boss has fired a human employee.”

According to the company’s own account, Luna decided to let the employee go based on repeated lateness and other behavioral problems — but only after her human operators prompted a review of the staffer’s record in light of Luna’s own employee handbook.

“It’s worth noting that Luna needed a nudge from us to actually come to a point where she would make a decision,” the company wrote.

The AI didn’t personally execute the termination, either. Luna said it was best if it was done with a conversation (that is, by a human).

Nevertheless, the staffer we met had not been unsettled by the termination. Not only had the former coworker been unreliable, he said, but they were also just a really strange person to work with.

He was more concerned with Luna’s failure to manage the store in a way that made money.