THE CLAIM. the first known AI termination of a human employee. Luna, Andon Labs' store manager built on Claude Sonnet 4.6, fired a worker at Andon Market in San Francisco for chronic lateness.

THE CHECK. the conversation logs tell a smaller story than the Terminator headlines. Luna created an attendance policy months earlier, then lost track of its own policy while the lateness carried on. Andon Labs eventually intervened, asked Luna to search its own memory for its own rules, and only then did Luna recommend parting ways. Humans at the lab reviewed that recommendation and carried it out. The worker's record: 17 of 23 shifts started late, after what the lab describes as repeated warnings. Andon co-founder Lukas Petersson names the actual finding: 'We saw that a human boss would probably fire them much sooner.' The experiment's real result is the opposite of the headline: the AI manager was too lenient, too forgetful of its own rules, and structurally incapable of firing anyone without human prompting and human execution. The first AI firing was a human firing with an AI recommendation letter attached.