The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has published a report warning that agentic AI systems—autonomous assistants that shop, book, and manage services on behalf of users—may not act in consumers' best interests. Key concerns include agents steering users toward pricier or less suitable products that benefit the platform, personalization enabling harder-to-detect manipulation and dark patterns, AI hallucinations causing costly real-world errors when agents take autonomous actions, and over-reliance leading consumers to stop scrutinizing automated decisions. The CMA stops short of proposing new regulations, noting existing consumer protection laws already apply to AI-driven decisions, with companies remaining liable for their agents' behavior.
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