It is the UK’s antitrust regulator Amazon and its relationship with AI startup Anthropic. This comes after completing an Amazon a $4 billion investment to the company. It is an Anthropic organization for the uninitiated .
The investigation will decide whether the aforementioned $4 billion investment qualifies as a merger under current rules set by the country’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). If it is formally considered a merger, the investigation will examine whether it would harm competition. in the country. Investigators have 40 working days to reach a decision.
Amazon previously said the investment did not give it a large stake in Anthropic. . Company the investment “does not raise any competition concerns or meet its threshold for CMA review”. Anthropic also dismissed the notion that the investment indicated any merger.
Today we announce it @Amazon It will invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic. The agreement is part of a broader collaboration to develop reliable and high-performance foundation models. pic.twitter.com/lPJ03oqr6C
— Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) September 25, 2023
“We are an independent company,” said a spokesperson. “Amazon does not have a seat on Anthropic’s board, and no board has observer rights. We intend to cooperate with the CMA and provide them with comprehensive information about Amazon’s investment and our commercial cooperation.”
The investigation is a small piece of a larger puzzle in which UK regulators are trying to curb “quasi-mergers”. This is when larger companies have a big impact on startups through strategic investments or by acquiring talent. This would, in theory, give the legacy company all the benefits of a merger, but without the regulatory scrutiny that would accompany a formal takeover.
To that end, the CMA is also set to launch an investigation into its large investments in Google and Anthropic. The company is reported to have made two major investments, one worth $300 million and the other $2 billion. Anthropic has raised $10 billion since its inception in 2021, so Google and Amazon account for more than half of that amount.
It is a regulatory body To Microsoft’s close partnership with OpenAI, this may represent a quasi-merger. It is also considering hiring the core team behind Inflection AI, a rival to Microsoft’s OpenAI. Last month, the CMA said it would expand the latter to a full investigation.
