Given the significant influence of global tech giants in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the UK’s competition regulator has recently launched an antitrust review of Microsoft and Amazon. On Wednesday (April 24th), the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) stated that it is seeking third-party opinions on the AI partnership between Microsoft and Mistral AI, as well as the partnership between Amazon and Anthropic.
At the end of February, the European AI unicorn Mistral AI announced a collaboration with Microsoft, becoming the second company after OpenAI to provide large-scale model services on Microsoft’s cloud service Azure. Meanwhile, at the end of March, Amazon increased its investment in Anthropic, a major competitor of OpenAI, bringing its investment in the latter to $4 billion.
The CMA also expressed interest in hearing third-party opinions on Microsoft’s hiring of former employees of Inflection AI and related arrangements.
In March, Microsoft appointed Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, to head its newly established Consumer AI division and hired several employees from his AI startup, Inflection AI.
The CMA has not reached any conclusions regarding whether these transactions comply with UK merger rules or raise competition concerns.
“Investment, Not Merger”
In response to the CMA’s inquiries, Microsoft and Amazon argue that their investments in AI startups do not constitute mergers.
Microsoft stated, “Common business practices such as talent recruitment or partial investment in AI startups promote competition, which is different from mergers.” A company spokesperson said, “We will provide the CMA with the necessary information for their investigation.”
Amazon also stated that “this type of cooperation under CMA review is unprecedented.”
A spokesperson for Amazon noted, “Unlike collaborations with other AI startups and large tech companies, our collaboration with Anthropic includes limited investment, and Amazon does not serve as a board member or observer but continues to allow Anthropic to operate its models across multiple cloud providers.”
Stricter Regulation
For the two aforementioned partnerships, the CMA will seek opinions until May 9th. This is the first part of its information-gathering process, followed by the commencement of a formal investigation.
Previously, the CMA had been investigating the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI and sought opinions in December last year.
The CMA stated on Wednesday that it is also considering feedback on the Microsoft-OpenAI collaboration and is currently awaiting information from both companies.
In January of this year, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requested information on recent investments and collaboration relationships between OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Anthropic, concerning generative AI companies and cloud service providers.
It is evident that global regulatory bodies are striving to address the significant influence of tech giants in the field of Artificial Intelligence.
