Weekly Rewind: 7/31/26

Atlantic City Casino Hotels May Have Overplayed Their Hand, and more.

Credit: iStock/JHVEPhoto

By Zachary Hagen-Smith

Welcome back to The Economic Populist’s Weekly Rewind. Every Friday, we’ll briefly recap the week’s biggest news, updates, and developments in the fight against corporate power.

Here’s what to know this week.

Atlantic City Casino Hotels May Have Overplayed Their Hand

Earlier this week, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals revived a landmark antitrust case alleging Atlantic City casino hotels, including Caesars Entertainment, MGM Resorts, Hard Rock, Tropicana, and Borgata, used an AI algorithmic pricing tool to coordinate and raise room prices. The suit, brought by guests, alleged that major Atlantic City casinos were sharing real-time, internal pricing and occupancy data with Cendyn’s Rainmaker software, effectively allowing them to use competitors’ confidential information to generate recommended room rates, ones the hotels adopted roughly 90% of the time.

This reversal of fortune for the casino hotels comes as people across the country are calling algorithmic price fixers’ bluff, often using recently enacted antimonopoly regulations. In Philadelphia, a new lawsuit is accusing corporate landlords Willow Bridge and RealPage of illegally using algorithmic rent-setting software to coordinate rental prices, marking the first case brought under the city’s 2025 antitrust law. Likewise, California antitrust law firm Simonsen Sussman LLP last month launched a case under a 2025 California algorithmic price fixing law alleging certain Golden State gas stations leverage software tools to coordinate higher prices, extracting hundreds of millions of dollars from drivers.

As for Atlantic City, a lower court had previously dismissed the case, but the appeals court stated unequivocally that “AI software can facilitate collusion.” Economic Liberties’s view: What’s illegal in a smoke-filled boardroom is still illegal in a line of code. As this case and the fight for fair prices proceed, we’ll continue to keep a sharp eye on the underhanded ways big business tries to rig markets

Lina Khan Was Right About Open-Source AI

Twitter has a new star member — and he sounds a lot like a former FTC chair. Last week, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang joined the social media site, posting a viral open letter signed by leaders from Microsoft, Meta, Google, and other Big Tech companies opposing restrictions on open-source AI models. These are systems whose trained parameters are publicly released so developers can run, modify, and build on them without relying on a single company’s platform.

The CEOs urged that openness is essential to innovation, competition, and broad access to the technology. Their letter closely echoes warnings Lina Khan made years ago: allowing a single AI company to dominate the technology could enable it to control the critical infrastructure developers rely on, raise barriers to entry, and pick winners and losers across the AI economy.

This open-source push comes as increasingly capable open-source models begin to emerge from Chinese developers — and as dominant American AI giants OpenAI and Anthropic lobby to entrench their dominance with barriers around the technology’s development.

Though the financial underpinnings of the current AI boom remain suspect — an AI-focused hedge fund recently suffered major losses and NVIDIA’s AI deals continue to raise circular investment concerns — when it comes to the technology itself, as Joe Weisenthal co-host of Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast put it, there are four words everyone in tech should now be saying: “Lina Khan was right.”

Quick Hits

• The Trump administration announced it will end a Biden-era subsidy program for standalone Medicare Part D prescription drug plans a year early, a move expected to raise premiums for many seniors while eliminating billions of dollars in federal payments to private insurers. As we’ve covered, Medicare Part D — aka Medicare Advantage — has fueled a new frontier of vertical consolidation, where insurance conglomerates use excess government payments to acquire healthcare providers, manipulate billing to make patients appear sicker and thus more costly, and steer seniors to their affiliated providers, all of which drives up costs for taxpayers and undermines patient care. Rather than saving seniors from a harmful program, the move punishes patients for being misled.

• Resistance to secret data center deals is mounting across the country. In Oregon, Gov. Tina Kotek cancelled the sale of public land for a Salem data center following a tense city council meeting where residents raged against a nondisclosure agreement the city signed. Meanwhile, a growing number of Louisiana lawmakers are requesting an end to data center NDAs. This pushback comes as the Trump administration leans harder into data centers, encouraging development on pubic land and rolling back pollution protections.

• A new study from the Center for Law and the Economy, a think tank led by former FTC Chair Lina Khan, found that Amazon’s and Walmart’s AI shopping assistants can detect false “Made in USA” claims — which both platforms are apparently rife with — but do not flag them for consumers.

• The FTC opened an antitrust investigation into the proposed Covetrus-MWI Animal Health merger, amidst concerns the combined company would control of up to 75% of the veterinary drug distribution market.

• In other FTC news: instead of taking Corteva to trial for allegedly paying distributors to block cheaper generic pesticides, the FTC once again opted for a weak settlement without structural remedies and with fines worth only 10% of the total damages.

• Big businesses ghouls are creeping out of the woodwork to support the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger — including AMC’s CEO and WME and TKO head Ari Emanuel, who inked a $7.7 billion Paramount deal for UFC rights, which TKO owns, and who sat next to Trump at the UFC White House match (previously, Emanuel urged Trump to settle with Live Nation-Ticketmaster). This comes as reporting from Variety indicates a sizable portion of Warner Bros. staff and even executives oppose the deal. As a new op-ed in The New Republic from Senior Fellow Alvaro Bedoya reminds us, ordinary workers stand to lose the most from this merger.

• Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed into law a ban on private equity firms and other large institutional investors that already own 100 or more single-family homes in the state from purchasing additional properties.

• The San Francisco Board of Supervisors held a hearing to scrutinize Kaiser Permanente’s proposed contract terms with mental health clinicians, which union members say would allow the insurer to expand AI-driven care tools and reduce reliance on human therapists.

• Need to see a dentist? The Alliance of Independent Dentists has a new tool to find an independent dentist near you.

• Research Director Matt Stoller went on MS NOW to break down how a soaring number of employees at some of the largest and wealthiest corporations in the country are being forced to rely on SNAP and Medicaid.

• ICYMI: There’s a secret way big landlords are jacking up rent. Managing Editor Helaine Olen sits down with Guardian reporter Tracie McMillan to discuss how junk fees are hitting tenants hard.