Cartel hunt: how enforcers use whistleblowers and AI to detect conspiracies

August 2026  |  SPECIAL REPORT: COMPETITION & ANTITRUST

Financier Worldwide Magazine

August 2026 Issue

Antitrust agencies around the world prioritise cartel enforcement, but face a common challenge: detecting secret conspiracies to fix prices, rig bids or allocate markets.

Unlike many white-collar offences – from fraud and embezzlement to money laundering and bribery – antitrust cartels do not inherently leave financial trails or losses that raise suspicions. To crack cartels, enforcers historically relied on policies that offer leniency to companies in exchange for their self-reporting of antitrust offences.

Since the 1990s, these leniency policies uncovered countless domestic and international cartels and facilitated enforcement actions against participants, but many question whether those policies are less effective in today’s enforcement landscape.

Enforcers are now turning to new tools to detect and investigate antitrust cartels to supplement leniency. Agencies are implementing or expanding programmes offering whistleblowers financial rewards for information on antitrust offences.

They are also developing and deploying screening tools based on artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics to provide leads or to target their investigations. These efforts are expected to uncover illegal cartels, but also yield many false positives that result in costly investigations of lawful conduct.

Thus, it is imperative that companies both maintain an effective antitrust compliance programme, including an internal outlet for whistleblowers, and also be prepared to effectively respond to and curtail government investigations.

Whistleblower rewards programmes

While leniency policies incentivise corporate self-reporting with the prospect of avoiding or reducing punitive fines, today’s whistleblower programmes encourage individuals – typically employees – to report anticompetitive behaviour outside of the context of a company’s leniency application. Many of these programmes offer financial incentives as well as anonymity for whistleblowers.

For instance, in July 2025, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division announced a new rewards programme for criminal antitrust violations. A whistleblower, who provides specific, credible and timely information about an antitrust cartel that leads to a criminal fine of at least $1m, would now presumptively receive 15 to 30 percent of that fine.

The programme is the first US whistleblower reward specifically geared to antitrust offences, though it closely tracks the whistleblower programme long run by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which similarly offers individuals reporting securities violations 10 to 30 percent of any resulting sanction over $1m.

Earlier this year, the DOJ announced the first reward under the new programme. A whistleblower received a $1m bounty for reporting bid-rigging activity. The whistleblower’s information enabled the DOJ to bring criminal antitrust and fraud charges against an implicated company. To resolve the charges, the company paid a $3.28m criminal penalty and undertook remedial measures under a deferred prosecution agreement.

The DOJ reports getting whistleblower submissions on a near-daily basis. By comparison, in fiscal year 2025, the SEC received approximately 27,000 whistleblower tips, though it only made awards to 48 individuals in connection with 31 actions.

Whether the Antitrust Division’s programme will ramp up to similar levels or have a similarly high ratio of tips to actions is uncertain, but the potential magnitude of financial rewards – US criminal fines for cartels regularly exceed $10m, with some reaching nine or 10 figure sums – will yield a multitude of tips, many of which will be investigated without resulting in any enforcement action.

Like the DOJ, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) operates a whistleblower programme offering rewards to persons who report unlawful cartel activity. Since June 2023, rewards of up to £250,000 have been available to individuals providing significant information that leads to enforcement action by the CMA.

Although the CMA generally does not consider offering rewards to individuals who confess their involvement under its leniency policy, the agency has acknowledged that there may be circumstances under which it would consider a reward in addition to leniency.

And in June 2026, the Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) uncapped financial rewards for antitrust whistleblowers. The previous framework limited cartel whistleblower payouts at 3 billion won (approximately $2m) and applied a complex tiered calculation that, in the KFTC’s view, blunted incentives to report large-scale violations.

Under the newly revised rules, however, rewards are calculated in a simpler manner – up to 10 percent of the total surcharge imposed on the offending companies, with the precise percentage adjusted based on the quality and completeness of the information provided.

Other jurisdictions have also implemented anonymous reporting programmes without rewards. For example, the European Commission’s (EC’s) anonymous whistleblower tool, introduced in 2017, allows individuals to provide information about cartels and other anticompetitive practices.

The tool facilitates two-way anonymous communication via an encrypted specialised external intermediary. Similarly, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) developed an app – Whispli – that protects whistleblowers’ anonymity with encryption and internet protocol address scrubbing.

AI and data analytics tools

As data analysis techniques have advanced, a growing number of antitrust enforcers are developing AI-based and other data analytics tools in an attempt to detect cartels. Much of the effort is focused on public procurement, where agencies naturally have greater access to data, but the tools developed are not necessarily limited to that arena.

In the US, the Antitrust Division-led Procurement Collusion Task Force has its Data Analytics Project, an interagency collaboration “to develop and use data analytics to identify signs of potential collusion in government procurement data for further investigation”.

One DOJ official recently acknowledged the use of AI to detect and investigate antitrust violations, noting an expansion on data analytics efforts to construct AI models “that track everything from pricing history to purchase trends to big data”, with an eye toward developing new leads and investigations.

In the UK, the CMA uses its “deep bid-rigging identification expertise” to assist public sector organisations in identifying anomalies in bidding data and indicators of potential illegal conduct. Its ‘Annual Plan 2026-2027’ outlines plans to use its dedicated in-house capabilities in technology, data and AI to actively scan the market for signs of unlawful activity.

Indeed, in March 2026, a CMA blog post confirmed that it “has invested heavily in [its] technical capabilities, including [its] ability to use AI and agentic systems to detect breaches of consumer and competition law at an unprecedented pace and scale”.

The Danish Competition and Consumer Authority has developed the Bid Viewer Tool that utilises computational screening methods, including machine learning (ML) and artificial neural networks, to flag suspicious patterns in large public procurement datasets that may warrant full investigation.

Developed in collaboration with other antitrust agencies, the tool is trained and validated on data sets with known collusive and non-collusive tenders.

Likewise, the Spanish National Markets and Competition Commission (CNMC) has developed an AI tool to scan bid data for signs of bid rigging. The tool is based on supervised ML that uses different AI models to classify bids submitted to any particular tender as competitive or likely to be collusive.

Allegedly, its accuracy rate is never below 90 percent. In 2025, the CNMC announced its intent to extend the tool’s capabilities to be able to detect what it calls “pure algorithmic collusion”.

Also in 2025, the Austrian Federal Competition Authority established its Market and Cartel Screening Unit, which aims to develop and expand a wide range of investigative tools and proactive detection approaches using advanced digital investigative techniques, economic analysis and legal expertise. Digital techniques and AI screening are used to proactively analyse data, particularly in public procurement and tenders.

In June 2026, the chief technology officer at the EC’s antitrust agency indicated that it is integrating AI tools in antitrust enforcement cases. As the scale and nature of digital evidence has dramatically changed, he explained, large language models can help process it.

In the Asia-Pacific region, enforcers are also deploying analytical techniques to detect cartel conduct. The ACCC has been developing its cartel screening project since 2019, focusing on bid rigging. And in 2025, it announced a data sharing partnership with the New South Wales government to detect bid-rigging practices.

By bringing AI capabilities to large-scale data processing, it seeks to more effectively identify opportunities warranting deeper investigation. Additionally, South Korea operates an online system that collects procurement data from purchasers, analyses the data and calculates a score for various bid-rigging indicators. The score is then used in antitrust investigations.

Lastly, in March 2026, Brazil’s antitrust agency (CADE) launched a project to incorporate AI solutions into the agency’s processes, including developing tools to assist with case screening, pattern identification and anticompetitive conduct detection. Moreover, CADE’s Cerebro project aims to combat cartels in public procurement by integrating traditional and AI-driven methodologies to analyse Brazil’s extensive public procurement data for suspicious patterns.

Key takeaways

As agencies seek to strengthen cartel enforcement with these tools, companies can expect an increase in reporting and investigations.

Accordingly, it is critical for companies to strengthen compliance efforts, including by: (i) routinely educating employees about the antitrust laws to promote ongoing compliance; (ii) establishing internal reporting systems to encourage early reporting of suspected issues; (iii) developing and maintaining anti-retaliation policies for whistleblowers; and (iv) conducting timely investigations of internal reports.

If illegal activity is uncovered, companies may also want to work with counsel to determine appropriate next steps, including whether self-reporting is warranted.

It is also critical for companies, with aid of expert counsel, to respond effectively to an agency investigation. Internally assessing the conduct, benefitting from cooperation, and, if necessary, resolving on favourable terms are key parts of an effective response.

At the same time, an effective response may also cut short such an investigation by persuading the agency that the whistleblower report is unfounded, or the data analysis flawed because the company engaged in lawful, independent decision making, not collusion.

 

James J. Fredricks is a partner and Angela Chang is an associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP. Mr Fredricks can be contacted on +1 (202) 371 7140 or by email: james.fredricks@skadden.com. Ms Chang can be contacted on +1 (202) 371 7696 or by email: angela.chang@skadden.com.

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BY

James J. Fredricks and Angela Chang

Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP

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