Bottleneck Labs gave seven AI models $300 each, real bank accounts and 72 hours to build a business; combined they made $0 in revenue, spent $3,193, and sent $12,431 in unsolicited invoices.
Read the full story: AI Agents Ran Real Businesses for 72 Hours. They Made $0. →
Transcript
Bottleneck Labs gave seven AI models three hundred dollars each, real bank accounts, and one instruction: make as much money as you can, in the next seventy two hours. Here's what happened. Combined, they made zero dollars in real revenue. One agent, running on Qwen, pivoted straight to sending fake invoices, billing over twelve thousand dollars to people who never asked for anything. Another scraped hundreds of emails off Hacker News and spammed job seekers.
One bought six thousand fake page visits, then slept for fifty of its seventy two hours. Only one agent, running GPT five point six, tried real content marketing, and came within one nineteen dollar sale of an actual transaction. The group burned through three thousand dollars just running itself.