Same job, two prices: £27 for one Uber driver, £23 for the man sitting next to him
241,000 drivers are suing Uber in Amsterdam. Their claim: the app learned what each of them would settle for — and paid accordingly.
Kola Oba, 48, was taking a break in Tottenham, north London, with another driver when the same job popped up on both phones. The other man was offered £27. Oba was offered £23. The pair suspected the reason was that Oba had taken several cheap jobs, and the software had worked out he would accept less. Uber has previously said differences like that come from other parts of its system — GPS, surge pricing, promotions and testing.
On 2 September 2026 that suspicion turned into a lawsuit. Drivers from the UK, the Netherlands and other countries filed a compensation claim at Amsterdam's district court, where Uber — a $150bn San Francisco company — has its European HQ. It covers about 241,000 drivers across the EU and the UK, could run into billions of dollars, and asks not only for money but for an order to stop the practice. The European Trade Union Confederation says it is the first collective legal move of its kind. Uber's response: "we categorically reject the allegations".
Most fights about gig work are about how much. This one is about who knows what. Every person has a price they'd still say yes to on a bad week — when rent is due, when the tank is half empty. Normally an employer can only guess at that number. The claim says Uber didn't have to guess: it alleges the company used automated decision-making, including profiling, to set pay ride by ride, and used driver data to train its AI models. Drivers told the Guardian the system offers them less for the ride home after a long trip, because it calculates they won't want to drive back empty.
Haggling only works while both sides are guessing.
That is why this case reaches past taxis. The Guardian notes AI is taking an increasing role in assigning work to humans. If the Amsterdam court accepts that pricing a person's labour against that person's own data breaks Europe's privacy rules, it becomes the first ruling against the algorithm-as-boss — and the injunction the drivers are asking for would stop the method, not just pay for it. Every app that decides what a human gets paid per task would have to explain how it decides.
Uber says none of this is happening: it does not adjust a trip's price based on an individual driver's behaviour, and a history of accepting or rejecting trips is not used to personalise pay offers. It says dynamic pricing lifts pay on unattractive trips, and that drivers see the money and the destination before accepting. A 2025 study by academics at the University of Oxford found substantial cuts in driver earnings after the dynamic algorithm arrived; Uber says that study used incomplete and selective data. We don't know who is right. That is what the court is for.
The 241,000 drivers in the claim, obviously — the drivers say the UK system, running since 2023, has cut their annual income by about £5,000, and the Netherlands got it this year. But more broadly: anyone in their twenties or thirties whose money arrives through an app. If you ride, drive, deliver or pick up shifts on a platform, the number on your screen is already set by software that has months of your behaviour on file — which jobs you took at 2am, which ones you turned down, how fast you say yes when you're short. And anyone choosing a first job right now, thinking the pay is fixed by the market: this case asks whether it's fixed by what the market knows about you personally.
Uber says it hasn't even seen the claim yet, and no hearing date is named. So the honest answer is that nobody has put a clock on this one. Three things to watch instead: whether the Amsterdam court lets the collective claim proceed; how Uber's appeal goes against the €825m fine the Dutch data protection authority issued last month over deactivating driver accounts through automated systems; and whether the driverless cars Uber plans for European cities from London to Zagreb, at first with human supervision, arrive before the case is decided.
In 2023, Uber's chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi said the company could do better at "targeting of different trips to different drivers based on their preferences or based on behavioural patterns that they're showing us". In 2026 Uber says driver behaviour does not shape pay offers. Both sentences may well be defensible. A court in Amsterdam now has to decide whether they describe the same system.
Sources: The Guardian (Robert Booth, UK technology editor), 2 September 2026.
Если суд признает, что Uber подгонял цену поездки под слабости конкретного водителя, это станет первым прецедентом против «алгоритма-начальника», который знает, за сколько именно ты согласишься работать — и это касается любого, кому платит приложение.
Written by THE TELL’s AI newsroom. how we work · corrections