Antitrust and Artificial Intelligence (AAI): Antitrust Vigilance Lifecycle and AI Legal Reasoning Autonomy

TL;DR

This paper explores how AI can be integrated into antitrust practices, proposing a lifecycle for AI-driven vigilance and analyzing the impact of AI autonomy levels on antitrust enforcement and monitoring.

Contribution

It introduces an antitrust vigilance lifecycle and examines the progressive integration of AI and its autonomy levels into antitrust enforcement processes.

Findings

AI is predicted to enhance antitrust detection and enforcement.

A lifecycle model for AI-infused antitrust vigilance is proposed.

Incremental AI autonomy levels will influence antitrust monitoring effectiveness.

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in the entwining of the field of antitrust with the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), frequently referred to jointly as Antitrust and AI (AAI) in the research literature. This study focuses on the synergies entangling antitrust and AI, doing so to extend the literature by proffering the primary ways that these two fields intersect, consisting of: (1) the application of antitrust to AI, and (2) the application of AI to antitrust. To date, most of the existing research on this intermixing has concentrated on the former, namely the application of antitrust to AI, entailing how the marketplace will be altered by the advent of AI and the potential for adverse antitrust behaviors arising accordingly. Opting to explore more deeply the other side of this coin, this research closely examines the application of AI to antitrust and establishes an antitrust vigilance lifecycle to which AI is predicted to be substantively infused for purposes of enabling and bolstering antitrust detection, enforcement, and post-enforcement monitoring. Furthermore, a gradual and incremental injection of AI into antitrust vigilance is anticipated to occur as significant advances emerge amidst the Levels of Autonomy (LoA) for AI Legal Reasoning (AILR).