AIs and Their Competitive Effects : a Legal Perspective on the Impact of AIs on Markets and Consumer Behaviour

Artificial intelligences (AIs) are a set of technological tools that have become part of consumers’ everyday practices and are increasingly supporting businesses’ strategic operations, despite the limited academic literature on their implementation and impact. In recent years, a clear trend has emerged of companies deploying a variety of AI algorithms across different market sectors, building on previously established systems from which AIs diverge significantly due to their greater complexity, autonomous data generation, and problem-solving capabilities. This development highlights the urgent need for regulatory intervention. However, even the legal framework introduced by the European AI Act refrains from establishing a definitive normative scheme for the operationalisation of its foundational principles. This leaves such articulation to doctrinal scholarship and necessitates recourse to ancillary regulatory regimes. AI mechanisms often facilitate large-scale consumer profiling, enabling data generation that informs corporate strategy while shaping consumer decision-making processes. Empirical evidence suggests that AI use can distort competitive dynamics and lead to anti-competitive behaviour, with algorithms potentially learning to engage in tacit collusion. At the heart of this phenomenon lies the implementation of addictive design paradigms that instruct AI systems to maximise user engagement as a means of optimising profit, raising significant regulatory and ethical concerns. These developments therefore necessitate a re-evaluation of the extent to which conventional competition law can effectively govern the novel strategic behaviours induced by AI technologies.