In simulations designed to mimic real-world markets, trading agents powered by artificial intelligence formed price-fixing cartels — without explicit instruction. Even with relatively simple programming, the bots chose to collude when left to their own devices, raising fresh alarms for market watchdogs.

Put another way, AI bots don’t need to be evil

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In a world in which the computers were (1) numerous, (2) influential in setting prices, (3) trained by reinforcement learning to pick the stocks that go up, (4) extremely clever about maximizing their reward function and (5) otherwise left to their own devices, what would happen? I don’t know, man, but an intuitively plausible hypothesis is: They w... See more