The opinions of lesser generative computational intelligence system manufacturers regarding Microsoft and Amazon’s collaborations are being sought by British competition authorities.
On Wednesday, the Competition and Markets Agency of the United Kingdom announced that it was inviting interested parties to provide their opinions on the significant AI collaborations between Microsoft and the French AI company Mistral, Amazon and the American startup Anthropic, and Microsoft’s hiring of former Inflection AI staff members.
The CMA is looking into whether the agreements among these businesses constitute acquisitions and is asking interested parties to provide feedback by May 9.
The request for comments is the first step in an information-gathering procedure that takes place before British regulators formally begin a Phase 1 review. The CMA pointed out that an invitation to remark does not initiate the official Phase 1 review.
Microsoft has invested 15 million euros ($16 million) in Mistral, a company founded by former workers of Google’s DeepMind AI lab and Meta.
Under the terms of the agreement, Mistral, which investors last estimated to be worth 2 billion euros, would become the second business after OpenAI to host its large language models (LLM) on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform.
On the other hand, Amazon has made a massive $4 billion investment in the American artificial intelligence company Anthropic, which created the Claude chatbot and big language model. Amazon said that it will continue to own a minority share in Anthropic but will not be sitting on the board.
Microsoft denied that its acquisition of Mistral and the recruitment of Inflection were mergers.
A Microsoft representative stated in a statement, “We are satisfied that standard business practices, like hiring talent or investing a small amount in an AI startup, encourage innovation and are in no way identical to a merger.”
The spokeswoman continued, “We will give the Competition and Markets Authority of the United Kingdom the data it requires to finish its investigations as soon as possible.”
A representative for Amazon claimed that the CMA’s examination of the kind of partnership the business had agreed upon with Anthropic was “unusual.”
According to an Amazon representative, “Our partnership with Anthropic involves a small amount of investment, does not provide Amazon a director on its board or observing position, and keeps going with Anthropic operating its algorithms on multiple cloud providers,” in contrast to collaborations among other artificial intelligence startups and major technology companies.
Our investment in Anthropic, which recently unveiled its top-performing Claude 3 models, is contributing to the generative AI market being increasingly competitive compared to what it has been in the past few years. Additionally, clients are thrilled about the chances this partnership is giving them. We hope that the CMA agrees to swiftly address this, as we are sure that the evidence will speak for itself.
Anthropic’s affiliation with the digital behemoth has no bearing on the company’s independence or ability to form partnerships, a representative for the organization told CNBC.
The representative sent an email to CNBC stating, “We plan to work together along with the CMA to give them all the details about Amazon’s investment and our advertising collaboration.”
According to them, anthropic independence is a fundamental quality that is essential to both their public benefit goal and their ability to assist clients in whichever way and wherever they choose to interact with Claude.
Preliminary Examination
Another indication that the British authority has decided to take a harsher stance on massive American technology corporations and address the competition difficulties these businesses offer is the CMA’s early examination of Microsoft’s and Amazon’s AI relationships.
For several months last year, for instance, the CMA blocked Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, a company that makes video games. Because they believed there would be a significant reduction in competition, the regulator first took proceedings to prohibit the acquisition.
After Microsoft offered compromises to the regulator, particularly an agreement with Ubisoft to give the French video gaming developer cloud access to Activision’s current PC and console games as well as any titles developed by Activision for the next 15 years, the regulator approved the arrangement.
