The investments of Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. in startups artificial intelligence will be subject to greater scrutiny by the government’s antitrust watchdog. United Kingdomin the latest example of global regulators taking on the way the world’s biggest tech firms are influencing the burgeoning market.
The Competition and Markets Authority declared on Wednesday that it was gathering information from market players to determine whether the $4 billion collaboration between amazon and the signature of AI Anthropic threatens competition in the United Kingdom.
It also indicated that it was examining the associations of Microsoft with Mistral and Inflection AIa startup that lost its CEO and most of its staff to Microsoft last month. The actions of Microsoft and amazon They showed little change in operations prior to the market opening.
The swift action follows the agency’s findings that the pattern of big tech companies investing in technology startups AI could allow them shape markets and raise competition concerns. The CMA revealed to have discovered an “interconnected network” of partnerships and investments within the AI.
“We remain confident that common business practices like hiring talent or making a fractional investment in a startup AI “They promote competition and are not the same as a merger,” said a spokesperson for Microsoft.
The association of Microsoft with OpenAI Inc. She is already in the midst of an initial investigation by the agency, which announced it was investigating her in August. It is expected that this alliance avoid European scrutinyas regulators see no need for a formal investigation by failing to meet the definition of an acquisition.
The United States Federal Trade Commission is also in the early stages of examining the nature of investment Microsoft in OpenAI and whether it could violate antitrust laws.
“It is unprecedented for the CMA review a collaboration of this type,” he said amazon in a statement. “Our collaboration with Anthropic includes a limited investment, does not grant amazon a director on the board nor an observer role, and continues to have Anthropic running their models on multiple cloud providers.”
In a blog post, the CMA He said that the associations in AI they could have “pro-competitive benefits” but the agency remains concerned about the possibility that large technology companies are using these alliances “to protect themselves from competition.” The CMA has also opened a separate exploration of the Cloud Computing.
Microsoft has made a series of alliances and agreements in AI in recent months. In February, the company announced a partnership with Mistralmaking the French startup’s models available to cloud service customers Azure of Microsoft. With that, Microsoft also made an investment of 16.5 million dollars in Mistrala deal that immediately attracted scrutiny from European regulators.
Mistral said they would work closely with the CMA to “ensure that our long-term independence and market access are maintained.”
“We are an independent company and none of our strategic partnerships or investor relationships diminish the independence of our corporate governance or our freedom to partner with others,” a spokesperson for Anthropic.
In March, Microsoft announced that he had hired Mustafa Suleymanthe co-founder of Inflection AIanother rival of OpenAI that Microsoft had supported. Suleyman joined as vice president, bringing much of his startup’s staff with him to Microsoft.
Inflection said it would abandon its main service – a personal assistant chatbot based on AI – in favor of a service for business customers and would license its technology to Microsoft. The company, which raised $1.5 billion, assured investors they would be fully compensated.
amazon has moved more slowly in adding capabilities Generative AI in comparison with Microsoft and Alphabet Inc.’s Google However, the e-commerce giant has tried to catch up through its market-leading cloud business.
With its most recent deal, a $2.75 billion injection into Anthropic In March, the startup agreed to rely on Amazon Web Services for some of your operations and use custom chips from amazon. Anthropic also has an investment of Googlewhose cloud the startup also uses.
©2024, Bloomberg
