Source: Finance Association
① The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) began an antitrust review of Microsoft and Amazon on Wednesday (April 24); ② the CMA is seeking opinions from third parties on the artificial intelligence partnership between Microsoft and Mistral AI and the partnership between Amazon and Anthropic; ③ the two companies involved argue that their investment in these startups is not a merger.
In view of the huge influence of global tech giants in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), the UK competition regulator recently began a round of antitrust reviews of Microsoft and Amazon.
On Wednesday (April 24), the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it was working on$Microsoft (MSFT.US)$Artificial intelligence partnerships with Mistral AI, and$Amazon (AMZN.US)$The partnership with Anthropic seeks input from third parties.
At the end of February, European AI unicorn Mistral AI announced that it had reached a cooperation with Microsoft, becoming the second company after OpenAI to provide large-scale model services on Microsoft's cloud service Azure. At the end of March, Amazon made an additional investment in Anthropic, OpenAI's first rival, increasing its investment in the latter to 4 billion US dollars.
The CMA also said it would like to hear the opinions of third parties on Microsoft's employment of former Inflection AI employees and related arrangements.
In March, Microsoft appointed Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, as head of Microsoft's newly formed consumer artificial intelligence division and hired several employees from his artificial intelligence startup Inflection AI.
The CMA believes that no conclusion has been reached on whether these deals comply with UK merger and acquisition rules, or whether they will raise competition concerns.
“Investments are not mergers”
In response to the CMA's question, Microsoft and Amazon argued that their investment in AI startups was not a merger.
Microsoft said, “Common business practices such as recruiting talent or making partial investments in artificial intelligence startups promote competition; this is not the same as a contract.” A company spokesperson said, “We will provide the CMA with the information it needs for its investigation.”
Amazon also stated that “this type of cooperation reviewed by the CMA is unprecedented.”
An Amazon spokesperson stated, “Unlike collaborations with other AI startups and big tech companies, our partnership with Anthropic includes limited investments. Amazon does not serve as a board director or observer, but instead continues to let Anthropic run its models on multiple cloud providers.”
Stricter regulation
The CMA will seek comments on the two partnerships mentioned above by May 9. This is the first part of its information-gathering process, followed by a formal investigation.
Previously, the CMA was already investigating the partnership between Microsoft and Open AI and solicited comments in December of last year.
The CMA said on Wednesday that the agency is also considering feedback on Microsoft's collaboration with OpenAI and is currently awaiting information from the two companies.
In January of this year, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asked OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Anthropic to provide information on recent investments and partnerships between generative artificial intelligence companies and cloud service providers.
It can be seen from this that global regulators are struggling to cope with the huge influence of tech giants in the field of artificial intelligence.
edit/lambor