UK competition regulator looks into Amazon’s Anthropic funding | Computer Weekly

▤ Summary

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has begun looking at whether it should investigate Amazon’s partnership with Anthropic under the merger provisions of the Enterprise Act 2002. In April 2024, the CMA invited interested third parties to give their views on whether the partnership between Microsoft and Mistral AI, the partnership between Amazon and Anthropic, and Microsoft’s hiring of former employees and related arrangements with Inflection AI, fall within UK merger rules and the impact these arrangements could have on competition in the UK. The report’s authors warned that this could ultimately harm businesses and consumers, such as by reducing choice and quality, and raising prices, for example. The technical update identified Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Apple and Nvidia as the major firms that have created “an interconnected web” of partnerships with several AI startups. Fladgate’s Haffner added: “The fact that the CMA is going to be looking in depth at this particular transaction will doubtless again bring up a debate, which is ongoing, as to how far competition regulators should go to intervene in the AI space at such a crucial time for its overall development.”

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