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A comment on OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21). Parent comment

Re:OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21) by nozzlegear on Monday August 24, 2026 @01:17PM (#49422974)
> If OpenAI and Anthropic are smart, they will maintain similar pricing rather than aggressively undercutting each other, allowing the market to resemble Home Depot and Lowe’s, or cloud computing, where AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure coexist as highly profitable competitors.

Wouldn't that just be price fixing? If they arrive at their prices independently and they all happen to be similar, fine. But if they're all "smart" and coordinate so none of them undercuts the other, that's probably illegal.

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Re:OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21) by tccole on Monday August 24, 2026 @01:35PM (#49423252)
Illegal for sure but rarely enforced.
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Re:OpenAI: GPT 5.6 Sol price reduction (until at least Nov 21) by maxgiraldo on Monday August 24, 2026 @02:53PM (#49424262)
My understanding is that collusion among competitors is illegal (although I’m not a lawyer). I was referring instead to the prisoner’s dilemma that Bruce Greenwald discusses in Competition Demystified. In theory, competitors, like prisoners who are pitted against one another to rat on one another, are usually better off cooperating rather than turning against each other.
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