The UK competition watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), announced on Wednesday (24) that is investigating the partnerships of artificial intelligence (IA) between:
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- Microsoft and the French startup Mistral AI and
- Amazon and the American company Anthropic.
In addition, the CMA also wants to hear testimonies from third parties about the hiring by Microsoft from former employees of Inflection AI, another AI startup, and related agreements.
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It is worth remembering that, last month, the Microsoft appointed Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind (the AI research laboratory of the Google), as head of a new consumer-facing AI unit. In addition Microsoft hired several employees from Suleyman's startup, Inflection AI.
The CMA clarified that it has not yet reached any conclusion on whether the deals breach UK merger rules or raise competition concerns.
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A Microsoft, in turn, appeared confident. “Common business practices, such as hiring talent or partially investing in AI startups, promote competition and are not the same as a merger,” said a company spokesperson. “We will provide the CMA with the information it needs to complete its investigations quickly.”
Already Amazon argued that “it is unprecedented for the CMA to analyze a collaboration of this type”. “Unlike partnerships between other AI startups and large technology companies, our collaboration with Anthropic includes a limited investment, does not give Amazon a director or observer on the board, and allows Anthropic to continue running its models across multiple cloud providers ,” said an Amazon spokesperson.
It is worth noting that the CMA was already investigating the partnership between Microsoft to OpenAI and requested statements in December last year. “The CMA is also considering feedback received earlier this year about the CMA partnership. Microsoft to OpenAI and is currently awaiting information requested from companies,” the regulator said on Wednesday.
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The decision to examine partnerships Microsoft-Mistral AI and Amazon-Anthropic emerged after the CMA identified “an interconnected network” of more than 90 partnerships and strategic investments involving the same companies in a recent report on AI foundational models.
In January, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ordered the OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Anthropic provided information on recent investments and partnerships involving generative AI companies and cloud service providers.
The CMA is inviting testimony until May 9th. This is the first part of the information gathering process and occurs before a formal investigation begins.
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