BRAVA — Spain's Competition Authority Uses AI to Catch Bid-Rigging Cartels, With Sanctions to Prove It

Spain's national competition authority, the Comisión Nacional de los Mercados y la Competencia (CNMC), built an in-house machine-learning tool called BRAVA (Bid Rigging Algorithm for Vigilance in Antitrust) inside its Economic Intelligence Unit and put it to work screening public-tender bids for signs of collusion from 2024.

BRAVA classifies submitted bids as potentially collusive or competitive, automating a task that previously depended almost entirely on manual document review or a prior tip-off. In February 2026, CNMC president Cani Fernández stated publicly that BRAVA-flagged leads have already resulted in sanctions, citing cases including a resale-price-maintenance sanction against I.C.O.N. and a bid-rigging cartel in the travel-services sector; she also said the CNMC is now training the US Department of Justice on the method and has begun building a follow-on reasoning tool, ATENEA, to help interpret BRAVA's output.

As with comparable tools piloted at Lithuania's Competition Council and Brazil's CADE, CNMC has not published BRAVA's precision or false-positive rate, nor how many of its sanctioned cases were BRAVA-originated versus flagged through other channels — the public record so far is the regulator's own account of the tool's role.

Read the full analysis: https://www.osborneclarke.com/insights/ai-and-public-procurement-spain-anti-collusion-screening-secure-automation