AI Chatbots push pricier flights to wealthy users, study finds

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.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.