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Britain's competition watchdog has taken the primary steps in three further investigations into alliances between Big Tech corporations and artificial intelligence startups after the agency said its concerns about dealmaking within the fast-growing sector were growing.
The Competition and Markets Authority on Wednesday called for comments on Microsoft's hiring of key talent from Inflection AI and its minority stake in French start-up Mistral, in addition to Amazon's $4 billion investment in US company Anthropic, a number one competitor OpenAI.
Obtaining the opinions of competitors is a essential prerequisite for a proper investigation. The CMA said it had not yet determined whether the deals would fall under UK merger rules or raise competition concerns within the UK.
Regulators worry that Big Tech corporations could exploit AI corporations' insatiable need for computing power to coach large language models by luring cash-strapped startups to their cloud services in exchange for a stake that provides them an outsized stake Young corporations could often gain influence.
The CMA is already probing Microsoft's $13 billion investment in OpenAI, a deal that has also attracted the eye of antitrust regulators within the US and Europe.
Microsoft, which participated in a $1.3 billion funding round for Inflection last 12 months, hired the startup's chief executive Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of Google's DeepMind, in March, amongst several other team members. The move got here after Microsoft entered right into a “multi-year partnership” with Mistral, a year-old AI startup, in February.
Amazon last month expanded its existing investment in Anthropic, maker of the Claude AI system. Anthropic had previously received funding from Google.
In a paper this month, the CMA said it had found an “interconnected web” of greater than 90 partnerships and investments involving the identical six major tech groups – Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and chip maker Nvidia – leading to There is a risk of “over-dependence on a handful of enormous corporations”.
Sarah Cardell, the chief executive of the CMA, said the regulator was “determined to learn the teachings of history” after a small variety of mainly US-based corporations dominated the internet marketing, cloud computing and mobile industries.
Amazon, which previously clashed with the CMA over its minority stake in British food delivery service Deliveroo, responded to the regulator's latest possible intervention.
“It is unprecedented for the CMA to contemplate a collaboration of this nature,” Amazon said, citing a “limited investment” in Anthropic that doesn’t grant it seats on the board or require the start-up to make use of only its cloud computing service to make use of. “By investing in Anthropic. . . We are helping to make the generative AI segment more competitive than in recent times.”
Microsoft, which spent most of last 12 months fighting the CMA over its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, noted that it was unusual for the agency to contemplate a deal that was about staffing moderately than a full-blown deal Fusion would work.
“We remain confident that common business practices equivalent to hiring talent or making a partial investment in an AI startup promote competition and will not be the identical as a merger,” Microsoft said. “We will provide the UK Competition and Markets Authority with the knowledge it needs to finish its investigation expeditiously.”
Mistral said it will work with the CMA “to make sure our long-term independence and market access is maintained” and said it was committed to “promoting fair competition, openness and transparency.”
Anthropic said the corporate also intends to work with regulators and “provide them with an entire picture of Amazon's investment and our business cooperation.”
“We are an independent company and none of our strategic partnerships or investor relationships affect the independence of our management or our freedom to work with others,” it added.
