Newly unsealed court documents reveal that Amazon pressured major brands to push rival retailers into raising prices — a strategy California’s attorney general says is price fixing, caught in writing and in plain sight.
Amazon, the world’s dominant online retailer, engaged in a systematic campaign to pressure household brands, including Levi’s and Hanes, into leaning on competing retailers to raise their prices, according to a New York Times report citing newly unsealed documents filed in a California antitrust lawsuit.
What California’s Antitrust Lawsuit Against Amazon Alleges
California first sued , alleging the company harmed competition and drove up the prices consumers pay online. At the heart of the case is a claim that Amazon punished sellers on its marketplace whenever those sellers offered lower prices on rival platforms — including the websites of Walmart and Target.
Now, as the lawsuit moves towards trial next year, the state has released a less-redacted version of a 16-page filing that fleshes out precisely how Amazon allegedly executed that strategy: not directly, but through the brands themselves.
According to the filing, whenoffering a lower price — or found itself losing money on a product — it would contact the relevant brand and flag the discrepancy. The brands, in turn, would approach rival retailers and ask them to bring their prices back up. In several documented instances, those retailers complied.
“You don’t see price fixing so explicitly and egregiously in writing like this,” said Rob Bonta, California’s attorney general, in an interview.
The Emails That Exposed Amazon’s Alleged Pricing Pressure
The court documents contain a series of internal communications that the state says demonstrate the pattern in concrete detail.
In 2021, an Amazon employee emailed a Levi’s counterpart with links to the brand’s khakis listed on Walmart’s website, flagging the trousers as “styles of concern.” The Levi’s employee responded that Walmart had agreed to raise the price of one product to $29.99 as a “test for the best interest of the marketplace.” Amazon, which had been selling the same trousers for between $25.47 and $26.99, subsequently matched the higher price.
A separate 2022 email exchange with Hanes followed a similar script. An Amazon employee sent links to lower prices being offered by rival retailers; a Hanes employee replied that the brand had “reached out to Target and Walmart to have the prices increased.”
In another instance from 2021, that its ice cream maker had been “taken down” from the platform because it was listed elsewhere for $17.99 — down sharply from $59.99. Matching that price had already cost Amazon roughly $7,000 in a single day. Amazon “cannot sell at this significant loss,” its employee wrote. Maxi-Matic responded that it had “put Best Buy out of stock” and was “following up” with that retailer.
California noted that in none of these exchanges did Amazon directly discuss pricing with competing retailers — the brands served as intermediaries.
Amazon’s Response: ‘Transparent Attempt to Distract’
Amazon pushed back firmly. According to New York Times, Spokesman Mark Blafkin said the company looked forward to responding in court, describing the filing as a “transparent attempt to distract from the weakness of its case, coming more than three years after filing its complaint and based on supposedly ‘new’ evidence it has had for years.”
“Amazon is consistently identified as America’s lowest-priced online retailer, and we’re proud of the low prices customers find when shopping in our store,” NYT quoted Blafkin.
Walmart told New York Times, it did not comment on litigation in which it is not a party, adding that it would “always work hard on behalf of our customers to keep our prices low.” Target, Gildan, which acquired Hanes last year, Levi’s, Best Buy and Maxi-Matic did not respond to requests for comment.
Amazon’s Growing Regulatory Troubles in the US and Beyond
The California lawsuit is far from the only legal front on which Amazon finds itself under pressure.
The Federal Trade Commission and 17 US states filed suit against Amazon in 2023, accusing the company of illegally maintaining a monopoly in online retail by squeezing merchants on its platform and prioritising its own products — conduct that resulted in “artificially higher prices,” according to the government’s complaint.
In a separate matter, the FTC reached a settlement with Amazon over allegations that the company made it deliberately difficult for consumers to cancel their Prime subscription. Under the terms of that agreement, Amazon agreed to pay up to $2.5 billion — including $1 billion in penalties and further payouts to consumers — without admitting or denying wrongdoing.
Why Amazon’s Market Power Makes This Case Significant
The allegations carry particular weight given Amazon’s dominance in e-commerce. The company is by far the largest online retailer in the US, dwarfing its nearest competitor, Walmart. While the majority of retail transactions still take place in physical stores, online commerce is growing at a substantially faster rate — and for certain product categories, it already accounts for the majority of sales.
California argues that is what made its alleged strategy effective. Brands had little choice but to comply when Amazon flagged pricing concerns, because losing visibility — or being delisted entirely — on a platform of Amazon’s size posed an existential commercial risk.
“Amazon’s message to vendors is clear: Ensure that prices at other retailers stay high or face consequences,” the state said in its motion.
The newly unsealed filing is part of a broader request California made in February, asking a San Francisco judge to halt Amazon’s alleged pricing practices while the antitrust lawsuit continues.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s Tech Crackdown
The Amazon lawsuit is not an isolated initiative. Bonta has positioned himself as one of the US’s most aggressive state-level regulators of the technology industry.
This year, he launched an investigation into Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI over the “proliferation of nonconsensual sexually explicit material” produced by its AI model, Grok. He has also backed tighter regulation of social media platforms — part of a wider effort to use California’s legal machinery to check the power of Silicon Valley’s largest companies.
The California antitrust lawsuit against Amazon is scheduled to go to trial in 2027 in San Francisco Superior Court.