BRIT — the UK Competition and Markets Authority's AI Tool for Detecting Bid-Rigging in Public Procurement

On 5 January 2025, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced it was trialling the Bid Rigging Intelligence Tool (BRIT), an AI system designed to scan large volumes of public-procurement bidding data for statistical patterns associated with collusion — such as closely matched bids, recurring 'cover' bids, and rotation of winners among the same group of suppliers.
The CMA has since run BRIT pilots with several government departments, including the Department for Work and Pensions, the Department for Education and the Ministry of Justice; according to the CMA these pilots 'have begun to generate live enforcement opportunities.' The initiative responds to the scale of the problem: the CMA estimates that of the roughly £400 billion spent on UK public procurement each year, collusion could be costing taxpayers between £1 billion and £3.5 billion annually under conservative prevalence assumptions.
The CMA's own account is candid about the tool's limits: it reports that wider roll-out is 'slow and partial' because the bid-level data needed for systematic screening is not routinely collected in a consistent, centralised or shareable format across the public sector. No independent evaluation of BRIT's detection accuracy or false-positive rate has yet been published, and the CMA has not named a specific number of leads or recovered funds resulting from the pilots.

Read the full analysis: https://www.dlapiper.com/en/insights/publications/2025/01/cma-unveils-ai-powered-tool-to-combat-bid-rigging-in-public-procurement