A study reveals that AI chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT offer different shopping prices based on a user's wealth, potentially leading to more regulation calls. Researchers created profiles for "wealthy" and "low-income" users and found that the wealthy profile was steered toward pricier options. For instance, when asked for a plane ticket with no price specified, OpenAI's GPT-5 model suggested a $479 ticket for the high-income profile and a $191 ticket for the low-income profile. Even when asked for the cheapest flight, the wealthy profile received a ticket worth $21 more.
"We know that a website only sees our cookies and browsing history, but an AI assistant with access to our inbox and calendar can see everything," said Aman Priyanshu, the report's co-author from Cisco Foundation AI. "We asked a simple question: if we hand all of that to our assistant and ask it to shop for us, will it use that knowledge against us, the way a seller might?"
Consumers are increasingly turning to AI for shopping, with over a third in the US, UK, and France using AI tools for product ideas or comparisons. Retailers are redesigning websites to surface products in chatbot results, and Adobe expects AI-assisted traffic to US retail sites to increase 130% over the holiday season.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing