As major retailers and tech giants like Walmart and Google roll out AI assistants that help consumers shop, purchase, and invest, questions remain as to whether these tools truly aim to help shoppers or are built to pad corporate profits
AI might be ready to be your accountant, your lawyer, your personal shopper, and your broker, but alarming questions remain as to whether these tools truly aim to help shoppers or are built to maximize consumer spending and pad corporate profits. As Groundwork Collaborative’s President and CEO Lindsay Owens and Policy Analyst Nia Law write in a new op-ed for The Capitol Forum, AI agents must be held to the same standards of fiduciary responsibility and conflicts of interest as human ones – and policymakers and regulators have a narrow window to put guardrails around this technology before it’s too late.
The piece comes after a new study from the University of Washington and Princeton University revealed that after ads were added to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, AI agents were more likely to suggest more expensive products and risky items like payday loans to users.
Owens has been a prominent critic of the new, high-tech ways corporations are finding rip off consumers, and, alongside her team at Groundwork, has undertaken a years-long effort to understand and expose the ways that emerging pricing technologies and strategies have enabled corporations to squeeze more out of consumers’ wallets. In late 2025, Owens and Groundwork, with Consumer Reports and More Perfect Union, published a blockbuster report exposing Instacart’s secret pricing experiments. The report forced Instacart to drop the practice after intense public backlash and helped spark at least 40 bills targeting personalized algorithmic pricing introduced in 24 states since the start of 2026.
The Capital Forum op-ed comes ahead of the September 29 publication of Owen’s debut book, Gouged: The End of a Fair Price–and What That Means for Your Wallet (Viking). The book, a searing exposé of the new tools of corporate profiteering and a field guide to deceptive corporate pricing tactics, takes aim at Big Tech behemoths, airlines, health insurance companies, and others to pull back the curtain on how price gouging is coming for almost every line item in Americans’ household budgets.
Op-Ed Key Excerpts:
Answering your questions often ineffectively is no longer enough. Now AI wants to spend your money.
As we careen into the agentic AI era, there is a glaring catch, though: these autonomous artificial intelligence “helpers” operate with none of the rules, obligations and guardrails governing their human equivalents. That raises a fundamental question: are they on your side?
The answer in a new study by researchers at the University of Washington and Princeton University is probably not. In the wake of OpenAI’s announcement that ads would be woven into ChatGPT, the study analyzed how AI models behaved when advertising and corporate incentives enter the picture. The alarming results demonstrated that “all current LLMs exhibit risky behaviors favoring the company over the user.”
Time and time again, the big guns of AI admit that they “do not understand how [their] own AI creations work.” [But] if opacity truly hamstrings AI companies’ ability to ensure that their agents act in good faith on behalf of users, then they have made a case against deployment rather than against regulation.
AI agents could be immensely useful. The question is whether the law will require them to be useful to you – saving you time and finding the best deal – or whether it will allow them to serve corporate bottom lines at your expense.
Holding AI agents to the same standards of fiduciary responsibility and conflicts of interest is a necessary starting point. It is also likely insufficient on its own. Preventing the full scope of AI-enabled exploitation will demand a suite of complementary policy actions – from robust antitrust enforcement to comprehensive data privacy protections, and more.
Existing laws that protect consumers against abusive and unfair practices and require companies to disclose endorsements give enforcers a number of tools to regulate this space. But the fact that one step doesn’t solve everything is not an argument against taking it. Even human agents are fallible. But they are constrained by professional and legal accountability as a condition of their service roles. As the rules of e-commerce are rapidly rewritten, AI agents must be accountable, too.