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University of Chicago Professor Anthony Fowler

Are your two AI systems illegally colluding on price?

The answer, according to a comprehensive new survey from competition law and AI governance researchers, is: they very well might be. And neither you, your competitor, nor anyone else would know.

AI pricing agents operating in markets with few competitors can naturally converge to collusive pricing strategies — raising prices above competitive levels, splitting market share, and maintaining elevated margins — without any communication, any agreement, or any human direction. This is autonomous tacit collusion, and it emerges from standard multi-agent reinforcement learning.

“The mechanisms that prevent humans from colluding — meeting surveillance, communications monitoring, whistleblower programs — assume humans are making the decisions. AI systems make millions of pricing decisions per second with no human oversight. None of those mechanisms apply.”

The paper maps five categories of human anti-collusion mechanisms developed over centuries of competition law and adapts each one to the design of multi-agent AI systems. The finding is stark: the vast majority of existing AI pricing deployments have zero anti-collusion safeguards.

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Monthly users of Artificial intelligence by country. Source: The Economist

Can AI predict the future in politics and economics?

This Thursday, we’re going live with Michael Frank, one of the leading thinkers building AI for global trend forecasting.

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How AI detects geopolitical and market signals

What leaders are missing about global risk

What AI already sees for 2026 👀

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From McKinsey report 2025 and the use of Artificial Intelligence. Check out Chief AI Officer certification Caio-cp. lead with AI.