British antitrust officials are looking at ways for Microsoft and Amazon to work together with smaller companies that make AI. The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority said that people could give their opinions on Microsoft’s partnership with the French AI company Mistral, Amazon’s partnership with the U.S. startup Anthropic, and Microsoft’s choice to hire people who used to work at Inflection AI.
These partnerships are being looked into to see if the deals they made with each other can be considered mergers. People are said to be asked to give their thoughts on the agreements next month, which would be before the British regulators do a Phase 1 review.
Microsoft recently put 15 million euros into Mistral, a company made up of people who used to work at Meta and Google’s DeepMind Lab. Because of this deal, Mistral would be able to offer its language models on Microsoft’s Azure Cloud platform for computers.
Anthropic is an American AI company that made the Claude language model and robot. Amazon put $4 billion into it.
It’s not true that Microsoft is working with Mistral or hiring people from Inflection. A Microsoft spokesperson said, “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.”
They also said, “We will give the UK Competition and Markets Authority the information it needs to finish its investigations quickly.”
The claims were “unprecedented” for Amazon to look into, according to a spokesperson. They said, “Unlike partnerships between other AI startups and large technology companies, 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.”
The fact that this happened shows that British authorities are against American tech companies and the competition they bring.
