Prices in the Machine - An Emergent AI Threat [View all]

AI’s real contribution to humanity could be maximizing corporate profit by preying on personal data to raise prices. In fact, it’s already happening.

https://prospect.org/2025/12/02/prices-in-the-machine-ai/



Earlier this year, a slightly balding man in spectacles, a black T-shirt, and bright high-top sneakers gave a presentation about how his computer can predict what you want to buy. His name is Dr. Uri Yerushalmi, co-founder and chief artificial intelligence officer of Fetcherr, an Israeli-based pricing consultant used by a half dozen airlines around the world. “While most of us in the AI community have been focusing on building models that are generating either text or image, in Fetcherr we have been focusing during the last five years on building large market models,” Yerushalmi said. Trained on years of market data—prices, orders, competitors, regulation, stock prices, even the weather—Fetcherr’s “business agents” aim to simulate market dynamics, assist pricing analysts, and even automatically price tickets.

One presentation slide stuck out. It showed price fluctuations before the use of Fetcherr’s system and after. In the before graph, prices are relatively static and straight. After Fetcherr, the jagged lines pulse with staccato rhythms. “The dynamic is much more similar to dynamics in NASDAQ or capital markets where the prices change much more frequently,” said Yerushalmi, “because every time something in the market changes, there is an immediate response.” Yerushalmi once ran AI for a high-speed stock trading firm. He approaches pricing like a science experiment, engaging in constant real-time testing and tweaking to maximize corporate profits. Fetcherr boasts of delivering annual “revenue uplift” of over 10 percent. The guinea pigs for these tests, the ones being separated from their cash, are you and me.



AI can depict you as an anime character. It can respond half-intelligently to questions about the Franco-Prussian War or concentrations of sulfur in the upper atmosphere. It can delight and distract and maybe help you get work done. But none of that is as prized by corporate America as its data-driven approach to the previously conjectural world of pricing. “That’s the use case they don’t want you to talk about. That’s why we’re building all these data centers,” said Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel for the American Economic Liberties Project. “As we have built social media platforms that shape the flow of information across society, now we are building the platforms that control the flow of money.”

Technology-fueled pricing is more widespread than once thought, presenting serious policy challenges in an age where affordability is on everyone’s minds. AI bots are colluding with one another, anticipating consumer choices, and accumulating surplus—that is, transferring wealth—for the businesses that employ them. It’s part of why corporate profits hit record highs after the pandemic and have stayed there. The public recoils at the thought of seeing prices tick up based on when they like to get lunch or what device they’re using. When Delta, which employs Fetcherr as a pricing agent, announced on an earnings call this summer that up to 20 percent of its flights would be priced using AI by the end of the year, the outcry was so intense that the company claimed its critics were peddling “misinformation.”

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