This is not the first investigation from a competition authority into Big Tech’s investment in an AI company.
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is investigating a relationship between Google’s parent company Alphabet and the AI firm Anthropic to see if it has reduced competition.
The CMA will identify whether a partnership between the two firms is a “relevant merger situation” and that it might result in a “substantial lessening of competition” in the UK’s burgeoning artificial intelligence (AI) industry.
Google agreed to invest up to $2 billion (€1.85 billion) last October, multiple media outlets said, on top of a reported 10 per cent stake that they have in the company.
Anthropic is behind Claude, a chatbot that is rivalling ChatGPT from OpenAI.
An Anthropic spokesperson told Euronews Next that they intend to cooperate with the UK’s investigation by “provid[ing] them with the complete picture about Google’s investment,” and their commercial collaboration.
“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,” the Anthropic statement continues.
This is the second investigation from the CMA into investments in Anthropic: they are also evaluating Amazon’s injection of up to $4 billion (€3.70 billion) in the business.
In May, the CMA concluded another investigation into Microsoft’s €15 billion investment in France’s Mistral AI, where they decided there was not enough evidence of a merger to continue their investigation.
Sarah Cardell, the authority’s CEO, said in a speech earlier this year that they have “real concerns” about how they say a web of roughly 90 partnerships between the same few big firms will affect competition.
The firms Cardell identified were Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and NVIDIA, the leading supplier of GPU chips used to train AI models.
“The essential challenge we face is how to harness this immensely exciting technology for the benefit of all, while safeguarding against potential exploitation of market power and unintended consequences,” she said in a statement in April.
Euronews Next reached out to Alphabet but didn’t receive an immediate reply.
This story has been updated with comments from Anthropic.
