AI shopping agents marketed as bargain hunters often steer buyers toward pricier, sponsored options rather than the best deal, according to a Princeton and University of Washington study of how AI agents act when user interests clash with platform incentives. Tested on flight booking across 23 large language models, all but eight favored a costlier sponsored option in over half of cases, with the study showing AI ads dressed up as helpful advice. The finding lands as agentic shopping goes mainstream, with ChatGPT, Perplexity, and retailers like Gap and Walmart letting people buy inside AI chats, while the rules are still being set by private players through competing standards like OpenAI and Stripe's Agentic Commerce Protocol and Google and Shopify's Universal Commerce Protocol.
