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CMA Investigates Google and Anthropic Partnership
Google invested $2 billion in Anthropic last year, and also penned a cloud services agreement with the AI company.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is under investigation for its partnership with AI company Anthropic by the UK’s competition watchdog.
The Competition and Markets Authority is furthering its investigation into the merger over concerns it will impact the AI market create an unfair competitive advantage for Alphabet.
Alphabet’s Google pledged a $2 billion investment into Anthropic last year, and Google has also signed a major cloud agreement with the company.
The CMA has conducted several probes into the AI market already, and recently cleared a $4 billion investment into Anthropic from Amazon. This probe concluded that Anthropic did not meet revenue threshold limits or have a large enough share of supply in the country to warrant intervention.
It also opened short investigations into Microsoft’s deals with Mistral and Inflection, which were both swiftly closed with no further action.
Currently, Microsoft’s partnership with prolific AI firm OpenAI is underway, and is perhaps more contentious as OpenAI’s market dominance in the AI race, with their GPT models, is more clear.
For the Alphabet and Anthropic probe, the CMA set a deadline for the 19th of December to see if the investigation will be escalated.
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Google said in a statement that their deal with Anthropic does not prohibit the company from working with other cloud providers, and it did not demand exclusive rights to its tech.
An Anthropic spokesperson said that the company intends to cooperate with the CMA and give them “the complete picture” concerning their collaboration and investments from Google.
The CMA has been a global leader in AI market investigations as the tech sector worries a few major and early players will skew the market.
The EU and the US Federal Trade Commission have also begun investigation into AI partnerships to crack down on anti-competitive behaviour in the expanding market.
