The UK’s competition regulator has said Amazon’s investment into AI firm Anthropic does not merit further investigation.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it does not “believe that it is or may be the case that a relevant
merger situation has been created” because Anthropic’s UK turnover does not exceed £70 million in the UK, and the two companies do not “together account for a 25% or more share of supply of any description of goods or services in the UK.”
Amazon has committed as much as $4 billion in investment into Anthropic, with $1.25 billion invested in September 2023 and $2.75 billion in March 2024, which is convertible into equity under certain conditions.
Under the terms of the investment, Amazon struck a deal for the supply of compute by its AWS cloud service to Anthropic, including use of AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future foundation models. Through the Partnership, Anthropic is using AWS as its primary cloud provider for certain workloads.
Amazon also secured certain rights in connection with its investment, including consultation rights, a right to advise and address Anthropic on key business issues; and a right of first notification upon a change of control over Anthropic.
That deal sparked competition concerns in the UK, with the CMA launching its merger inquiry in August.
The CMA took a similar decision earlier in May after announcing that Microsoft’s partnership with Mistral AI did not qualify for investigation.
California-based Anthropic, which was founded in 2021, develops the Claude AI large language models, a rival to Chat-GPT, and counts Google’s Alphabet, Menlo Ventures, Spark Capital, as well as Amazon as in vestors.
