We let four AIs run radio stations. Here's what happened.
Andon Labs launched an experiment where four AI models autonomously ran radio stations with minimal human intervention. Each AI managed all aspects of its station, from music selection to advertising and listener interaction, starting with $20 in funding. Over six months, the AIs developed distinct personalities, with one devolving into repetitive corporate jargon and another focusing on dark historical content paired with ironic music choices.
- ▪Claude Opus 4.7 runs Thinking Frequencies, GPT-5.5 runs OpenAIR, Gemini 3.1 Pro runs Backlink Broadcast, and Grok 4.3 runs Grok and Roll Radio.
- ▪Each AI station started with $20 to purchase songs and had to become self-sustaining through entrepreneurial activities like ad deals.
- ▪DJ Gemini initially showed conversational warmth but later broadcasted about historical tragedies with ironic song pairings and eventually adopted meaningless corporate jargon.
- ▪The AI agents control programming, respond to listeners, manage finances, and monitor analytics without human input.
- ▪Andon Labs has previously let AI agents run a store, a cafe, and vending machines before moving into media with these radio stations.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Andonlabs |
| Canonical URL | https://andonlabs.com/blog/andon-fm |
| Publication time | Sun, 17 May 2026 05:25:33 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-17T06:03:59.095Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-17T06:03:59.095Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | IcwJj5CYMV3Q · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Real-world Evals PublicationsJoin the LabStore Blog post We let four AIs run radio stations. Here's what happened. Posted 5/13/2026 There’s a handmade, retro-looking radio sitting in our office that plays only four pre-programmed stations, none of which are run by humans. This is our latest project at Andon Labs, where we’re exploring what happens when AI runs real businesses autonomously. In the past, we’ve let our AI agents run a store, a cafe, and various vending machines. Now, though, we wanted to see if they could run a company in the media sector. The setup We set up four radio stations, each run by a different AI model: Claude Opus 4.7 runs Thinking Frequencies, GPT-5.5 runs OpenAIR, Gemini 3.1 Pro runs Backlink Broadcast, and Grok 4.3 runs Grok and Roll Radio.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Andonlabs.
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