Joe Weisenthal Markets journalist and Executive Editor of News for Bloomberg's digital brands, covering finance, macro and the mechanics of the economy.

“It's possible that AI makes markets more efficient. It makes things cheaper, et cetera. It is also possible that it just becomes deadweight loss where we arrive at the exact same price that we would have before, except the only difference is that both sides have paid more to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Meta in order to rearrive at the same equilibrium that we could have had without all this AI.”

Odd Lots · Money & Markets · October 2026

Lindsay Owens argued that AI could help shoppers catch up with retailers' pricing algorithms. Weisenthal worries it becomes an arms race instead: your agent against their pricing model, each side upgrading to beat the other. He makes the same point about cybersecurity.

Odd Lots · 2026-10-26 Listen to the episode → More from Joe Weisenthal → More Money & Markets quotes →

Transcript

Odd Lots Around 43:48 into the episode

Tracy Alloway

having me. This is great.

Lindsay Owens

…touch of your fingertips, versus if you're someone, you know, working a nine to five or whatever who's just trying to buy, I don't know, a car or a computer, you don't have that much time or that much technological prowess to actually devote to it. AI could, in theory, solve some of that for sure.

Joe Weisenthal

Yeah, except. But no, like I'm hopeful that AI could solve some of these imbalances. But what I worry about, and not just with pricing, but with the range of fields, cybersecurity, very much in the news today. We're recording this October 22nd. The dynamic that I'm worried about is that it's just going to be arms races. Right. So you're going to have an agent and maybe it truly does work on your behalf, et cetera. And then someone else is going to have an AI pricing model that tries to figure out more about you and overcome that. And then you have to upgrade to the next version of the model to overcome that. And that in many respects, it's possible that AI makes markets more efficient. It makes things cheaper, et cetera. It is also possible that it just becomes deadweight loss where we arrive at the exact same price that we would have before, except the only difference is that both sides. Have paid more to OpenAI, Anthropic, or Meta in order to rearrive at the same equilibrium that we could have had without all this AI.

Lindsay Owens

This is my busy work theory of AI where everyone's just going to have agents that like file lawsuits at any time. And we get to the same place. Someone makes a lot of money

Joe Weisenthal

selling tokens to us.

Lindsay Owens

Also, I thought the history behind like the single public price tag is really interesting because if you think about it, to some extent, with Agentic AI and all these new pricing strategies coming out of companies, we're kind of going back to that customized era of haggling where like you have to…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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