A group of California drivers has sued six of the country’s biggest fuel retailers, accusing them of using an artificial-intelligence pricing tool to coordinate the cost of petrol and keep it artificially high.
The complaint, filed on 22 June 2026 in federal court in Sacramento, names BP, Circle K, Marathon Petroleum, 7-Eleven, Walmart, and Albertsons as defendants.
According to the complaint, the chains all fed data into the same algorithmic pricing software, supplied by a firm called Kalibrate, which the plaintiffs say draws on competitors’ prices to recommend what each station should charge.
The drivers allege that the practice amounted to a coordination scheme that lifted prices in step rather than through ordinary competition.
The numbers attached to that allegation are not small. In areas where a high share of stations used the tool, the plaintiffs claim, petrol prices rose by roughly 30 cents per gallon compared with what competitive pricing would have produced.
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The six companies between them operate more than 1,700 filling stations across the state, which gives any nudge to their pricing a wide reach, Bloomberg first reported.
The defendants span the major-brand forecourts, convenience chains, and supermarket fuel stations that together account for a large slice of where Californians actually buy petrol, which is part of why the plaintiffs argue the alleged effect was felt so widely.
The suit leans on two pieces of California law. The first is the Cartwright Act, the state’s main antitrust statute, which bars agreements that restrain trade. The second is newer: Assembly Bill 325, which took effect earlier this year and was written specifically to police algorithmic pricing.
The plaintiffs argue that feeding rivals’ data into a shared tool is exactly the kind of behaviour the new law was meant to catch, even where no executive ever sat in a room agreeing on a price.
That theory is at the centre of a broader legal argument now playing out across several US markets, from rental housing to hotel rooms: whether software that quietly aligns the decisions of competitors can break antitrust rules without the human handshake those rules were originally written to police.
Regulators have grown warier as AI moves deeper into commerce, and the California case puts a familiar product, petrol, at the heart of the question.
The plaintiffs are seeking unspecified damages. The filing does not put a dollar figure on the alleged harm, leaving that to be argued as the case proceeds. The defendants have not yet responded in court, and the allegations remain unproven.
Kalibrate is described in the complaint as the supplier of the pricing tool rather than as a defendant, and the case is framed as a proposed class action on behalf of drivers who bought fuel at the named stations.
California has long been one of the most expensive places in the US to fill a tank, a fact usually pinned on state taxes, environmental rules, and a relatively isolated network of refineries.
The lawsuit adds a software layer to that explanation, arguing that some of the gap reflects coordinated pricing rather than the usual structural costs.
For now, the practical questions sit with the court. The companies will need to file responses, and the plaintiffs will have to show that a shared tool produced something the law treats as coordination rather than independent firms reaching similar conclusions from similar data. How a judge in Sacramento draws that line could shape how far the new statute reaches well beyond the forecourt.
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