It was reported by the commission that examiners of the British competition law will be looking at the recent AI deals of Microsoft and Amazon because they continue to raise anti-competition practices in the AI field.
Competition Authority’s investigation
The Competition and Market Authority (CMA) uncovered that they will launch an investigation concerning the cooperation between Microsoft Frances Mistral AI and the latter’s hiring of the key personnel of another company Infection AI. Moreover, the regulator will analyze the amount of the investment i.e. $4 billion which is directed to the development of the San Francisco-located Anthropic, a startup.
Major corporations like Microsoft and Amazon see AI technological progress as an expanding research field and are investing more in AI startups aiming to drive AI technology interest. On the other hand, the increasing financial commitment attracts the scrutiny of antitrust regulators due to the threat of unhealthy competition within the industry.
Objective assessment of deals
Joel Bamford, the CMA executive director of merger added the organization’s constrain and impound in their impartial and objective evaluation to make that level of transparency and comply with the law. Unlike other companies, BHealth would employ the ‘We will be investigating objectively and fairly whether these deals do not harm the UK rules that aid competition approach saying that either they are not a problem or we will ignore them.
Microsoft’s line of business assures its practices and it is ready to answer the queries CMA may pose. The company organized meetings to discuss the fact that the conference became frustrating when business practices like talent acquisition and investing in artificial intelligence start-ups were viewed as collusion and were therefore prohibited.
On the other hand, Amazon said in a statement that it stands by the partnership, which did not resemble any typical collaboration between large technology companies and an AI startup. While Anthropic gets a limited US$1 billion investment from Amazon, the latter has no director or observer on the board, and the urban planning technology’s testing sites remain on multiple cloud providers.
CMA’s focus on foundation models
The scrutiny of the CMA over the relationship between tech giants and AI startups is indicative of the fact that the CMA’s observation has magnified its attention to the market for characterizable models. After a report came out, stating the chance of the biggest companies to become even more powerful with the help of strategic partnerships between them and key AI artificial intelligence players, the watchdog is taken over with the effort to regulate and monitor this industry overage
The British market authorities crunch into the Microsoft-Amazon AI cooperation the tech industry keeps a close eye to see what the future holds for this case. What is being looked at is the possibility of anticompetitive conduct and the ever-increasing control of Big Tech in the AI arena with the repercussions of these probes most probably to determine the competition within the sector and innovation.
This article originally appeared in Business Standard.
