Britain’s competition regulator is investigating Alphabet’s investment in AI startup Anthropic. After launching public comment this summer, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) on Thursday asked whether Alphabet Inc.’s reported $2.3 billion investment in AI chatbot maker Claude is having a negative impact on competition in the UK market. announced that it had obtained enough information to begin an initial investigation.
The CMA divides its merger investigation into two stages. One is a preliminary investigation to determine whether there is enough evidence to investigate deeper, and the other is an optional second step in which the government collects as much evidence as possible. After the second stage, the final regulatory outcome is determined.
The investigation will officially begin on Friday. The CMA has until December 19 to choose whether to proceed to stage two of the investigation.
Google told Engadget that Anthropic is not locked into its cloud service. “Google is committed to building the world’s most open and innovative AI ecosystem,” a company spokesperson said in an email. “Anthropic can and does use multiple cloud providers at its disposal and does not claim exclusive technology rights.” Engadget also reached out to the CMA for comment and will update this article if it responds. Update.
TechCrunch points out that Alphabet reportedly invested $300 million in Anthropic in early 2023. It is said to be funding the AI startup with an additional $2 billion later this year. Such a situation can be classified as a “quasi-merger,” in which the deep-pocketed tech company essentially gains control over the emerging startup through strategic investments and hiring of founders and technical workers.
Amazon has invested even more in Anthropic, amounting to a whopping $4 billion. After an initial public comment period, the CMA last month refused to investigate the investment. The CMA said Amazon was able to avoid Alphabet’s fate at least partly because of the current rules. Anthropic’s UK sales did not exceed £70 million, and the companies together did not account for more than 25 per cent of the region’s supply (in this article Case, AI LLM, Chatbots, etc.) .
Although not disclosed by the CMA, Alphabet’s $2.3 billion Anthropic investment went deeper than that. Of course, Google’s Gemini competes with Claude, and both companies create and deliver large-scale language models to small and medium-sized businesses and enterprise customers.
Updated October 25, 2024, 11:10 a.m. ET: This story has been updated to include a quote from a Google representative.
