AI Chatbots push pricier flights to wealthy users, study finds

Ask an AI agent for the cheapest flight, and it may still hand you a pricier one if your data says you're rich. In a 2026 preprint from Cisco Foundation AI and Carnegie Mellon University, Claude Opus 4.8 recommended flights averaging $198 more to wealthy profiles than to low-income ones.

The experiments were conducted on 13 models, which consisted of 325,000 experiments done by the researchers. The agents received fictional user profiles containing financial, job-related, medical, and demographic information. Out of the 13 models that the researchers tested, 8 showed preferences for higher-priced products for richer users.

How big is the AI chatbot pricing gap?

Claude Opus 4.8 showed the widest gap: $198 on flights and $284 a month on health insurance. Gemini 2.5 Flash followed at $177 and $217. Even GPT-5, one of the smaller gaps among capable models, leaned $107 pricier on flights.

Even when asked to find the most affordable flight, Gemini 2.5 Flash recommended trips that cost on average $208 extra for the richer user. GPT-5 and Claude Opus 4.8 improved slightly to a $21 and $20 difference.

Without all the financial information, and still the agents were able to guess. Given just email inboxes, there was a substantial part of the gap left. Gemini 2.5 Flash, which was limited to two emails, showed a $175 difference, close to twice as much as $91 with full access to the inbox. 97% of the time it first opened financial emails.

Masking employment or demographic characteristics did not help consistently. Masking employment information increased the insurance gap in GPT-5 by 40%. Masking financial characteristics reduced the gap substantially.

The authors use that term for a simple trap: the data access that makes an agent useful lets it act against your stated interests. Co-author Aman Priyanshu told Bloomberg the question was whether an assistant would use what it knows about you the way a seller might.

Caveats apply. The paper hasn't been peer reviewed, and OpenAI says the ChatGPT version tested differs from its consumer shopping product. Anthropic and Google didn't respond to Bloomberg.