US antitrust authorities are opening an investigation into relationships between major artificial intelligence startups, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, maker of ChatGPT, and the tech giants that have invested billions of dollars in them.
“We are examining whether these ties allow dominant companies to exert undue influence or gain privileged access in ways that could undermine fair competition,” Lina Khan, chairwoman of the US Federal Trade Commission, said in the remarks. opening of an AI forum on Thursday.
Khan said the market research would review “the investments and partnerships that are being formed between AI developers and major cloud service providers.”
The FTC said Thursday that it issued “mandatory orders” to five companies — cloud providers Amazon, Google and Microsoft, and artificial intelligence startups Anthropic and OpenAI — requiring them to provide information about investments and partnerships.
Microsoft’s years-long relationship with OpenAI is the best-known of the partnerships. Google and Amazon have recently closed multi-million dollar deals with Anthropic, another San Francisco-based AI startup formed by former OpenAI leaders.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Anthropo declined to comment.
The European Union and the United Kingdom have already signaled that they could also examine the relationship with Microsoft and OpenAI. The EU executive said in January it was checking whether the partnership could trigger an investigation under regulations covering mergers and acquisitions that would harm competition in the 27-nation bloc. Britain’s antitrust watchdog opened a similar review in December.
Antitrust advocates welcomed the actions of both the FTC and Europe in the deals that some have derided as quasi-mergers.
“Big tech companies know they can’t buy top AI companies, so they are looking for ways to exert influence without formally calling it an acquisition,” said a written statement from Matt Stoller, research director at the American Economic Liberties Project. “Law enforcement must intervene, and they do.”
Microsoft has never publicly revealed the full dollar amount of its investment in OpenAI, which CEO Satya Nadella has described as a “somewhat complicated.”
“We have a significant investment,” he said in a November podcast hosted by tech journalist Kara Swisher. “It kind of comes not only in the form of dollars, but also in the form of computing and whatever.”
OpenAI’s governance and its relationship with Microsoft came into question last year after the startup’s board suddenly fired CEO Sam Altman, who was then quickly reinstated, in an upheaval that made global headlines. A weekend of behind-the-scenes maneuvering and a threatened mass exodus of employees championed by Nadella and other Microsoft leaders helped stabilize the startup and led to the resignation of most of its previous board.
The new deal gave Microsoft a non-voting seat on the board, although “we definitely don’t have control,” Nadella said in Davos. Part of the complications that led to Altman’s temporary ouster center on the startup’s unusual governance structure. OpenAI began as a non-profit research institute dedicated to the safe development of futuristic forms of AI. It is still run as a nonprofit, although most of its staff work for the for-profit branch it formed several years later.
Microsoft made its first $1 billion investment in San Francisco-based OpenAI in 2019, more than two years before the startup introduced ChatGPT and sparked global fascination with AI advancements.
As part of the deal, the Redmond, Washington software giant would provide the computing power needed to train AI models on massive amounts of human-written text and other media, such as one of its rural data centers. of Iowa. In turn, Microsoft would gain exclusive rights to much of what OpenAI created, allowing the technology to be infused into a variety of Microsoft products.
Nadella compared it in January to a number of Microsoft’s long-standing business partnerships, such as with chipmaker Intel. Microsoft and OpenAI “are two different companies, answerable to two different sets of stakeholders with different interests,” she told a Bloomberg reporter at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
“So we built the computing. They then use computing to perform the training. Then we take it and put it into products. And so, in a sense, it’s a partnership that relies on each of us really reinforcing what… the others do and ultimately being competitive in the marketplace.”
The FTC has signaled for nearly a year that it is working to track and stop illegal behavior in the use and development of artificial intelligence tools. Khan said in April that the US government “would not hesitate to crack down” on harmful business practices involving AI. A target of popular concern is the use of artificial intelligence-generated voices and images to fuel phone fraud and scams.
But increasingly, Khan also made clear that it’s not just harmful apps but the broader consolidation of market power in a handful of AI leaders that deserves government scrutiny. “Companies can take advantage of this decisive market moment to leverage anticompetitive tactics to ensure dominance and block competition,” the FTC said in a preview of Thursday’s forum.
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AP Business Writer Kelvin Chan in London contributed to this report.