The UK’s antitrust watchdog claimed on Thursday that they have launched an official investigation against Google’s parent company Alphabet’s partnership with an artificial intelligence startup called the Anthropic.
It’s been 2 years since OpenAI and ChatGPT, which we use mostly every day, were released; these applications are backed by none other than Microsoft. Even though OpenAI was very useful in the beginning, as we only saw the several things it could do that could save a lot of our time, slowly people started to realize the facts on how these applications could use our data, their disadvantages, and all the ways in which it could harm the society we live in.
This realization resulted in the establishment of several rules and regulations all over the world. From a billion-dollar company to a new startup, all companies should follow all these regulations and protocols while developing an AI.
The CMA sought input earlier this year on the deal’s potential competition. After reviewing the submission, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) claims that they have sufficient information to initiate the probe. The CMA is still deciding whether they should approve this deal and dissolve the investigation or whether they should expand the investigation. CMA has time until December 19 to come up with a decision.
Alphabet has made an investment of about 2 billion dollars (£1.56 billion) into the startup in 2023, which is now under investigation. Alphabet signed a contract with the Anthropic, which developed the Claude LLM and chatbot. Anthropic was co-founded by OpenAI’s former executives, who are based in San Francisco, the siblings Daniela and Dario Amodei, in 2021.
It is not just Google that is being investigated; the Competition and Markets Authority is reviewing all the AI competitors as there is a lot of competition in the market; one of them is a deal between this same startup company, Anthropic, along with the American multinational e-commerce company, Amazon, that is also being investigated.
After Amazon had invested a sum of $4 billion into the Anthropic and became one of the cloud computing providers of the Anthropic, Similarly, the CMA is investigating Microsoft’s substantial stake in openAI, the company behind chatGPT, as well as Microsoft’s deal with AI startup inflection. It is not just these two; there is also another investigation that came to shore in May in the same company, Microsoft, due to the deal with another French AI startup called Mistral.
Anthropic, the startup company under the scrutiny of the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, has denied the claim that this partnership is a merger and says that they are still remaining as an independent company. According to Anthropic, its strategic planning and investor relationships do not compromise its cooperation, governance, or ability to collaborate with other companies.
Google, also the company involved in this issue, has reaffirmed its commitment to building a safe and innovative AI ecosystem around the world. Google also stated that it doesn’t demand any tech rights from Anthropic and that they are free to use any cloud provider they wish to.
