Criminal antitrust used to mean international cartels, nine-figure corporate fines, and a handful of executives. The 2026 docket looks different. It is broader in industries, heavier on individuals, more proactive in its investigative methods, and increasingly built around public money. This first post identifies six trends, drawing on the Antitrust Division’s published statistics, its FY 2027 budget submission, recent speeches by Criminal Enforcement chief Daniel Glad, and the cases on the Division’s court calendar. Part 2 turns the trends into compliance reminders.

1. The Charging Numbers Have Rebounded

Criminal cases filed fell to 9 in FY2023, a ten-year low, then rose to 20 in FY2024 and 27 in FY2025, according to the Division’s workload statistics and budget submission. Individuals charged reached 29 in FY2025, and total defendants charged reached 34. The investigative pipeline is deep: 167 grand jury investigations were pending at the end of FY2024, and the Division reported over 180 investigations in February 2026, with at least four jury trials planned for the calendar year.

2. Individuals and Prison Time Are the Point

The Division says plainly that individual accountability and general deterrence drive its program. Prison sentences more than doubled from 5 in FY2024 to 13 in FY2025. Over FY2015–2025 the average prison term is about 12 months, with 58 defendants receiving a year or more. Meanwhile corporate fines have shrunk dramatically, to about $6 million in FY2025 from $267 million in FY2023. The message in that contrast is that the enforcement risk has moved from the corporate treasury to the individual employee. Glad has made the same point: a corporate fine is paid by shareholders, but a prison sentence is served by a person.

3. Public Money Is the Center of Gravity

Most of the visible cases involve government funds. The Division’s list of recent investigations includes federally funded wildfire services in Idaho, asphalt paving in Michigan, transportation construction and erosion control in Oklahoma, federal IT purchases, fuel for the Navy and Coast Guard, Department of War maintenance and repair contracts, and steel in Puerto Rico, with more than 35 convictions from those matters alone. In Oklahoma, a jury convicted Sioux Erosion Control Inc., a company executive, and an employee in August 2026 of a five-year price-fixing conspiracy aimed at more than $100 million in publicly funded work. In Philadelphia, a transit parts supplier is awaiting sentencing, and a military-facility bid-rigging case is set for sentencing in Georgia. The Procurement Collusion Strike Force, created in 2019, reports more than 195 criminal investigations opened and more than 46,000 people trained, and it works with inspectors general across agencies. Glad’s former home program is now a pipeline: train the buyers, spot the red flags in procurement data, open the case.

4. Charges Beyond Classic Per Se Offenses

The Division is pairing antitrust counts with fraud and government-contracting offenses and testing the edges of the statute:

• In Idaho wildfire services, the Division obtained the first guilty plea to conspiracy to monopolize under Section 2 of the Sherman Act in decades and the first conviction in more than fifty years for attempted monopolization, according to the budget submission.
• In Las Vegas, a jury convicted a defendant of conspiring to fix the wages of home-health nurses and committing wire fraud, resulting in a 40-month sentence and more than $13 million in fines, restitution, and forfeiture.
• In the Navy and Coast Guard fuel matter, a trial team obtained guilty verdicts on 34 counts related to more than $4.5 million of fraud.
• A Texas border investigation involving a violent conspiracy to control an export industry produced sentences including an 11-year term.
• A forklift case alleges tariff evasion and fraud on federal sales.

For companies, the lesson is that antitrust exposure often arrives bundled with fraud, false statements, and contract violations, and that labor markets are no longer a safe harbor.

5. Proactive Investigations and More Data

Historically the Division relied on leniency applicants to bring in its larger investigations. Its budget submission now says it is increasingly relying on proactive investigations using covert recordings and wiretaps, and it frames these techniques as a “force multiplier” that also encourages leniency applications. The Division reviewed 343 terabytes of data in FY2025, up from 146 TB in FY2023. Glad argued in May that automation does not hide collusion: every automated bid, data feed, query, and parameter change leaves a record. The Division’s data-analytics work on procurement is designed to find patterns in those records.

6. Two Races: Leniency and Whistleblower Rewards

The Whistleblower Rewards Program, run with the U.S. Postal Service’s law enforcement agencies, paid its first award of $1 million in January 2026 in connection with an online used-car auction bid-rigging case (U.S. v. EBLOCK Corp., which the Division describes as a $16 million conspiracy). Glad has described two parallel races to the Division’s door: corporate leniency, which rewards the first company to self-report, and the whistleblower program, which gives an insider an independent financial reason not to wait for the company. In March, the Department’s first Corporate Enforcement Policy for non-antitrust criminal cases took effect, expressly carving out Sherman Act violations and leaving the Leniency Policy in place; Glad characterized the two as giving companies a path to resolve all criminal exposure, with leniency for antitrust and the new policy for fraud.

Credible Threat, Credible Record

Glad’s September speech reported four consecutive criminal jury trial wins, three with Sherman Act convictions, and in three of the four a case-in-chief of five days or fewer. He cautioned that trial records change. His larger point was that most cases resolve through guilty pleas, and the first plea in an investigation is often the beginning of the story. The Division’s trial capacity is what gives leniency and whistleblower awards their value.

What the Trends Do Not Mean

The Division’s own published tables show a modest overall caseload compared with the 1990s and the mid-2010s: FY2015 had 60 cases filed, and FY2023 had 9. Fines are far lower. The proper reading is not “more cartel cases than ever” but “different cases, with different defendants and different tools.” The enforcement risk for any given company depends on whether it sells to governments, operates in agriculture, healthcare, or labor markets, or participates in concentrated bidding environments.