AI at center of concern by lawmakers over Delta Air Lines, pricing company’s partnership

A partnership between an artificial intelligence (AI) pricing company and Delta Air Lines has three Democratic senators raising concerns, including U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner of Virginia.

Warner, vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has introduced discussion numerous times in recent years regarding the privacy of individuals and their data, as well as the risk to national security that AI presents.

Warner and Sens. Ruben Gallego of Arizona and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut are demanding answers from Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian after the company announced plans to ramp up use of AI to set surveillance-based ticket prices.

“Delta‘s current and planned individualized pricing practices not only present data privacy concerns, but will also likely mean fare price increases up to each individual consumer’s personal ‘pain point’ at a time when American families are already struggling with rising costs,” the senators wrote in a letter Monday.

Delta plans to deploy AI-based revenue management technology across 20 percent of its domestic network by the end of 2025 with Fetcherr, an AI pricing company, as reported by Reuters. According to a Delta executive, AI is able to set fares based on a prediction of “the amount people are willing to pay for the premium products related to the base fares.”

“There is no fare product Delta has ever used, is testing or plans to use that targets customers with individualized offers based on personal information or otherwise,” Delta said in a statement.

Dynamic pricing has been used in airline ticket pricing for more than 30 years, according to Delta. Dynamic pricing allows pricing to fluctuate based on various factors, including customer demand. Delta will use AI for dynamic pricing as a test to eliminate manual processes, and accelerate analysis and adjustments. All customers will continue to see the same available fares and offers across all retail channels.

AI may be useful for Delta in forecasting demand for specific routes and flights, while also adapting to market conditions in real time. AI is able to consider thousands of variables simultaneously and learn from each pricing decision how to improve future outcomes.

“The technology making that determination is trained using ‘all the data we can get our hands on’,” Fetcherr CEO Roy Cohen told Reuters. Fetcherr’s  website states that AI is possible of increasing aviation industry profits by as much as $4.4 trillion every year.

Blumenthal and U.S. Sens. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and Josh Hawley of Missouri asked Frontier Airlines and Spirit Airlines in January 2025 to share whether they used the personal information of customers to charge different fees.

“Individualized pricing, or surveillance-based price setting, eliminates a fixed or static price in favor of prices that are tailored to an individual consumer’s willingness to pay. Delta’s current and planned individualized pricing practices not only present data privacy concerns, but will also likely mean fare price increases up to each individual consumer’s personal “pain point” at a time when American families are already struggling with rising costs,” wrote the senators Monday.

The senators said the airlines were apparently “using customers’ personal information to charge different seat fees to passengers on the same flight” despite having the same fare.

“The implications for individual consumer privacy are severe on their own. Surveillance pricing has been shown to utilize extensive personal information obtained through a variety of third party channels, including data about a passenger’s purchase history, web browsing behavior, geolocation, social media activity, biometric data and financial status. Former FTC Chair Lina Khan has cautioned against a particularly egregious but conceivable example of an airline using AI to charge a higher fare to a passenger ‘because the company knows that they just had a death in the family and need to fly across the country’,” the senators wrote.

The senators demand answers on the company’s plans to protect Americans from price discrimination. They also requested answers to a series of questions around the types and sources of data Delta will use to train the AI system, how many passengers and which routes will be impacted, and what steps the company has taken to ensure compliance will follow all applicable federal and state laws.