The UK’s competition watchdog has formally opened an investigation into the merger between Amazon and AI company Anthropic, a statement released on Thursday (8 August) reads.
Amazon has invested at least $4 billion into AI company Anthropic, in a partnership that allows Anthropic to use computing power from Amazon Web Services and Amazon to provide exclusive access to Anthropic’s cutting-edge AI models, such as Claude 3 Sonnet.
The partnership caught the eye of the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which, as part of its ongoing work investigating partnerships between Big Tech and AI startups, has been monitoring the Amazon-Anthropic partnership and similar deals to see whether they stifle competition.
After inviting interested third parties to submit their comments on 24 April, the CMA issued a formal notice on Thursday that it was proceeding with a Phase 1 merger investigation into the partnership.
Whether it chooses to pursue the investigation further is expected to be decided on 4 October, the watchdog added.
Amazon, is “disappointed,” a spokesperson for the tech giant said in an email to Euractiv.
“Amazon’s collaboration with Anthropic does not raise any competition concerns or meet the CMA’s own threshold for review,” the spokesperson added.
“Amazon holds no board seat nor decision-making power at Anthropic, and Anthropic is free to work with any other provider (and indeed has multiple partners)”.
More partnerships under scrutiny
However, the Amazon-Anthropic partnership is not the only one being monitored by the regulators including the UK’s CMA.
The competition watchdog has identified 90 partnerships between Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Apple or NVIDIA (GAMMAN) and various companies in the AI value chain, and is also looking into a similar partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft.
The European Commission has reportedly dropped a merger probe into Microsoft’s $13 billion investment into ChatGPT maker OpenAI but is still looking into a competition angle.
In a joint statement on fair competition in AI development, the UK, the US and the EU recently said they were “working to share an understanding of the [competition] issues as appropriate and are committed to using our respective powers where appropriate”.