Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) American has launched an investigation to clarify the situation regarding the billion-dollar collaborations between OpenAI, Microsoft and other IT giants. The investigation aims to shed light on the nature of partnerships and investment management with respect to startups that deal with Artificial intelligence.
From what emerges, the feds would have a particular interest in investigating the partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft, with the Redmond company having hired Sam Altman and hired a staff of 700 people following him.
Second Lina Khanhead of the FTC, new technologies can create new markets and healthy competition that must be protected by keeping collaborations between the giants of the sector under control.
Under the antitrust magnifying glass, there would be not only the relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft. The synergies that we pay attention to are also those between Amazon e Anthropic e Google and Anthropic again. All multi-million dollar partnerships, which for their importance in the development of AI have attracted the attention of the feds.
OpenAI and Microsoft: the partnership monitored by the Federal Trade Commission to avoid potential abuse
As for Anthropic, both Amazon and Google have multi-billion dollar partnerships with the AI startup Dario Amodeiand his company will face scrutiny for both deals.
OpenAI and Anthropic build the large language models (LLM) most advanced in the world and their exclusive agreements with giants of the cloud like Google, Amazon and Microsoft are questioned. At the moment, there are no particular comments or statements from the companies involved in the investigations.
These partnerships have allowed Google, Amazon and Microsoft to have a great influence on startups dealing with Artificial Intelligence, even without making actual acquisitions. The very nature of the agreements, however, will be under inspection to identify any abuses with respect to the dominant position of the technological giants.