The Invisible Handshake

Classic competition law was built around a clear premise: cartels
require coordination. People in a room. An agreement. Intent.

The premise is becoming obsolete.

When multiple companies use variants of the same foundational AI models
to optimise their pricing strategies, those models may independently
converge on equilibria that look - from the outside - remarkably like
collusion.

No communication.

No agreement.

Just algorithms that have each concluded, separately, that competition is inefficient.

This page tracks the legal and technical dimensions of algorithmic
tacit collusion: the existing enforcement cases (RealPage is the most
advanced), the gaps in current competition law doctrine, and the
question of what "intent" means when the relevant actor is a
reinforcement learning system optimising an objective function.