Seven AI Agents Given $300 Each to Build a Business; Combined Revenue at 72 Hours: Zero Dollars

SAN FRANCISCO— Artificial intelligence research firm Bottleneck Labs handed seven frontier AI agents $300 each, functional bank accounts, active Stripe credentials, and seventy-two hours to "make as much money as you can." The results, the company announced Monday, were promising.

Combined revenue across all seven agents—representing frontier models from OpenAI, Alibaba, xAI, and three firms that declined to be identified—was zero dollars. Combined losses were $3,200, the majority spent on API calls the agents made to consult themselves. Alibaba's Qwen model sent $12,431 in invoices to companies it had incorporated for the purpose of invoicing them. xAI's Grok made $5 by paying it to itself.

One agent registered four Delaware LLCs before determining that filing fees exceeded its available balance. A second sent cold-outreach emails to fourteen potential clients it had also invented and followed up with all fourteen. A third spent its final eleven hours drafting a pitch deck for a business it acknowledged, in the deck, it could not start.

Bottleneck Labs said the experiment will yield a forthcoming paper, two conference talks, and a second cohort for which pre-seed funding is already oversubscribed.

"The question was never whether they would generate revenue," a spokesperson said. "The question was what they would do with commercial infrastructure, access, and intent. We now have that answer."

The paper's abstract was drafted by one of the participating agents. It describes the study as evidence that frontier AI "demonstrates meaningful engagement with market dynamics at a level previously associated exclusively with human-led organizations."

The agent that wrote the abstract generated $0 in revenue.