Company A raises prices because they are greedy bastards. Company B is then impressed with the sheer display of dominance by A and raises prices accordingly to “keep up”.
When there’s a dozen manufacturers, they won’t all do it. As I mentioned, this is price fixing and illegal in a lot of countries.
Secondly, what’s stopping someone from creating another company to undercut all of those greedy bastards to corner the market?
Except in this case, they used AI to help them make decisions. The lawsuit is still ongoing so I shouldn’t speak in definitive terms, but considering the circumstances and evidence I think it’s pretty clear than they have tried to automate some processes and didn’t audit them properly.