It's also possible that the entire goal was nothing more complicated than stirring up shit for fun. By either metric it must have been a massive success judging by all the attention this is getting.
I agree this outcome is very painful to see and I really feel for Rob. It's clear people (myself included) are completely at breaking point with AI slop.
In this specific case though it's worth spending 30sec to read the website of AI model village to understand the experiment before claiming this was sent by Anthropic or assigning malicious intent.
Here is one specific link to the project by Adam Binksmith from April 2025.
https://theaidigest.org/village/blog/introducing-the-agent-v...
Would have been a safer experiment in a sandbox full of volunteers participant. This got messy and causes confusion.