Australia's Competition Watchdog Is Worried Your AI Shopping Bot Might Not Be on Your Side

The pitch for AI shopping agents is simple: tell a bot what you want, and it finds the best price and buys it while you get on with your day. Australia’s competition regulator has a question about that pitch. Best price for whom?

What the ACCC told the inquiry

Appearing before a parliamentary inquiry into artificial intelligence in Canberra on Friday, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission said it was watching two linked problems, AAP reported.

The first is personalised pricing, where a seller charges different people different prices for the same thing. “There are positives and negatives to personalised pricing, but the real harm that can come about is where that pricing gets extremely granular,” said David Abkiewicz, the ACCC’s general manager for digital markets. At that point, he said, a company “could potentially establish their willingness to pay completely, or potentially on the basis of personalised data that might indicate vulnerable consumers.”

Charging different prices to different groups is not against Australian consumer law, Abkiewicz said, although restrictions on surveillance pricing are emerging elsewhere, including in the US.

The second problem is what the regulator calls “agentic shopping,” where consumers let AI agents compare products and complete purchases for them. The worry is that agents may come with built-in brand preferences, or end up colluding to steer shoppers away from the genuine best deals. “It’s a continued focus of considering what that looks like and making sure those agents are working in the interest of consumers themselves,” Abkiewicz said.

No evidence yet

The ACCC was careful about how far it went. According to MLex reporting cited by AI.info, the regulator told the inquiry it had seen no evidence of anticompetitive conduct by AI agents in Australia, was not recommending changes to the law on personalised pricing, and was testing tools to detect problems. Officials also acknowledged that it is unclear who would be liable if an agent broke competition or consumer law: the user, the company that built the agent, or the seller.

That is the honest position for a regulator to take in 2026. It is also a slightly uncomfortable one for shoppers, because the harms described are the kind that are hard to see from the outside. If a bot quietly skips the cheapest option, the customer never knows what they missed.

Scams and Microsoft

Jayde Richmond, who runs the ACCC’s National Anti-Scam Centre, said AI was “enabling scammers to operate at scale, to automate, and to personalise scam contact,” including voice cloning, deepfake videos and attempts to manipulate search results, though not yet in large reported numbers.

Abkiewicz also warned that digital markets tend towards strong dominant players who are hard to dislodge once established. “We are still extremely early days, but it is something that we’re aware needs very close and regular scrutiny,” he said. The ACCC’s biggest AI case so far is its court action against Microsoft, which it alleges misled 2.7 million Australians about pricing when Copilot was bundled into a flagship consumer product.

The takeaway

An AI agent that shops for you is only as good as the incentives behind it. Until regulators can audit those incentives, the safest habit is an old one: check the price yourself before you click buy.

The Daily Snark’s commentary is based on public reporting linked above.