Martin Coulter
(Reuters) – Britain’s antitrust regulator said on Tuesday it was scrutinizing Google parent Alphabet’s partnership with artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropik and its impact on competition.
More than 18 months after Microsoft-backed OpenAI released ChatGPT, sparking an AI boom, antitrust regulators around the world have grown increasingly concerned about several deals struck between smaller industry startups and major tech companies.
The deals under scrutiny include Microsoft’s partnerships with startups such as OpenAI, Inflection AI and Mistral AI, as well as Alphabet’s ties with other smaller companies such as Anthropic and Cohere.
Anthropic’s Claude AI model has been competing against OpenAI’s GPT series.
Last week, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) issued a joint statement with authorities in the US and European Union, pledging to work together to protect fair competition in the AI industry.
Co-founded by siblings Dario and Daniella Amodei, former OpenAI executives, Anthropic said last year it had secured $500 million in investment from Alphabet and pledged another $1.5 billion in future funding. Anthropic also uses Alphabet’s Google Cloud services as part of its operations.
The CMA said on Tuesday it was seeking views on whether the Alphabet-Anthropik deal could lessen competition in the UK, setting an August 13 deadline for comments.
An Anthropik spokesman said the company would cooperate with the CMA and provide “full information” about its partnership with Google. “We are an independent company and our strategic partnerships and investor relationships do not undermine our independent corporate governance or freedom to partner with others,” the spokesman said.
The CMA will decide at the end of this process whether to open a formal investigation.
A Google spokesperson said: “Google is committed to building the most open and innovative AI ecosystem in the world. Anthropic freely uses, and does use, multiple cloud providers, and does not seek exclusive technology rights.”
(Reporting by Yadaritha Chabon in Bengaluru and Martin Coulter in London; Editing by Shaunak Dasgupta, Louise Heavens and David Evans)