Agentic AI: Future Issues At The Intersection Of Technology, Innovation, And Competition Policy

Agentic AI presents amazing opportunities that will streamline and automate numerous tasks, and numerous agentic AI models and systems have already emerged. As agentic AI models and systems proliferate, however, new harms to competition might emerge, and practitioners should be aware of them. To that end, this article describes several threats to competition that could materialize in the context of agentic AI, including risks that a dominant AI agent provider or developer monopolizes the industry, that AI agents are used to facilitate collusive data collection of pricing or similar commercial data, and that AI agents could themselves enter into anticompetitive arrangements without human oversight. All of these risks are apparent in the United States, and extend throughout the world to the UK, EU, and beyond. Practitioners should also be aware of the interplay between fair competition and the interoperability of AI agents so that they can talk to each other.