Microsoft, Amazon AI corporations face scrutiny from UK CMA

Microsoft, Amazon AI corporations face scrutiny from UK CMA is profiled by BTW Media because published evidence links it to internet infrastructure, governance, operational dependencies, or market visibility.

• The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority is opening invitations to comment for interested third parties to give their views on major partnerships Microsoft and Amazon struck with smaller artificial intelligence firms.
• The CMA is inviting views on Microsoft’s deal with French AI firm Mistral and Amazon’s investment in U.S. startup Anthropic, as well as Microsoft’s hiring of former employees from Inflection AI.
• The CMA’s early scrutiny of Microsoft’s and Amazon’s AI partnerships is another sign of how the British regulator is looking to take a tougher stance on mega U.S. technology companies.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) of the United Kingdom announced on Wednesday 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.

Corporations of tech firms

Microsoft recently 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 was last estimated by investors to be worth 2 billion euros, would become the second company after OpenAI to host its large language models (LLM) on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform.

Microsoft denied that its acquisition of Mistral and its hiring of Inflection were mergers.

“We remain confident that common business practices, such as hiring talent or making a fractional investment in an AI start-up, promote competition and are not the same as a merger,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement.

The spokesperson continued, “We will give the UK Competition and Markets Authority the data it requires to finish its investigations as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, Amazon has made a massive $4 billion investment in the American artificial intelligence company Anthropic, which created the Claude chatbot and large language model. Amazon said that it will continue to own a minority share in Anthropic but will not be sitting on the board.

A representative for Amazon claimed that the CMA’s review of the kind of partnership the company had agreed upon with Anthropic was “unprecedented.”

An Amazon representative stated, “Our collaboration with Anthropic includes a limited investment, doesn’t give Amazon a board director or observer role, and continues to have Anthropic running its models on multiple cloud providers. This is unlike partnerships between other AI startups and large technology companies.”

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Early scrutiny

Another indication that the British regulator is looking to take a tougher stance on massive American technology companies and address the competition issues these companies pose is the CMA’s early examination of Microsoft’s and Amazon’s AI partnerships.

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 action to block the transaction.