The UK’s competition regulator began an an investigation into Google’s investment in Anthropic on Friday as it explores the concentration of market power in artificial intelligence.
The Competition and Markets Authority said its preliminary probe will conclude by 19 December, by which point it will take a decision on whether to commence a full-scale, phase 2 investigation.
Google parent Alphabet committed $2bn into the AI startup last year, and has also signed a major cloud agreement with Anthropic.
“We intend to cooperate with the CMA and provide them with the complete picture about Google’s investment and our commercial collaboration,” an Anthropic spokesperson said.
The CMA has previously expressed its concern over the dominance of a handful of companies in the AI market as well as investments by some of the biggest tech firms in the world. The US Federal Trade Commission and EU are also investigating several AI deals.
The CMA is currently also investigating Microsoft’s deal with ChatGPT maker OpenAI. It also launched an investigation Amazon’s investment into Anthropic in August, but opted to clear the deal last month.
The watchdog 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 $4bn in investment into Anthropic, with $1.2bn invested in September 2023 and $2.7bn 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.
Microsoft’s deals with Inflection and Mistral were also probed by the CMA but were cleared relatively speedily.
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