Tacit collusion among fully autonomous algorithms may not yet exist, but US antitrust laws will likely be unable to effectively address it, an enforcer with the Utah Attorney General’s office said Wednesday.
Tacit collusion among fully autonomous algorithms may not yet exist, but US antitrust laws will likely be unable to effectively address it, an enforcer with the Utah Attorney General’s office said Wednesday.“What's been described in the literature as fully autonomous tacit collusion … that's gonna be a tricky one to do anything with under existing antitrust law — whether the Sherman Act or state analogs,” Matthew Michaloski, an Assistant Attorney General with the Utah Attorney General’s office, said during an event.*
Michaloski added that he wasn’t equipped with the technical knowledge to know how close such collusion is to becoming a reality. “I don’t know, it may be very close.”
Competitors who agree to use the same price-aligning algorithms, on the other hand, “that’s going to get you a [civil investigative demand] or even worse,” Michaloski said.
Emily Chissell, a former senior official at UK’s Competition and Markets Authority who spoke during the same panel as the Utah enforcer, said that businesses “might need to kind of keep a watch on their algorithms” even where there aren't explicit inputs or instructions about aligning pricing.
Both businesses and enforcers that want to audit automated pricing practices will need to become familiar with technical evidence of how outcomes are determined and “get into the weeds of the algorithms to understand that,” Chissell said.
Once automated, tacit collusion becomes a “concrete” problem that it can be credibly observed in the real world, Michaloski said, “that might be a good opportunity for legislation.”
*American Bar Association Antitrust Spring Meeting 2026. Washington, DC. March 25-27, 2026.
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