The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is investigating Google-parent Alphabet’s partnership with AI startup Anthropic and its impact on competition.
Anthropic is an artificial intelligence (AI) safety and research company based in the United States which is considered to be a rival of ChatGPT developer OpenAI.
This becomes the latest AI partnership to come under scrutiny by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), which earlier this month launched a probe into Microsoft’s hiring of some former staff of Inflection AI and its partnership with the startup.
The CMA, which is seeking views on whether the Alphabet-Anthropic partnership could lessen competition in the U.K., has set a deadline of Aug. 13 for its so-called phase 1 invitation to comment.
The partnership between Amazon and Anthropic, owner of the generative AI chatbot Claude, has also drawn scrutiny from the British watchdog.
In October last year, reports surfaced that Google agreed to invest up to $2bn in Anthropic. The search engine company was said to have made an initial investment of $500m in Anthropic and committed to contribute an additional $1.5bn in the future.
Earlier that year, the AI safety and research company joined forces with Google Cloud to develop AI computing systems.
Google Cloud was also selected by the AI company as its preferred cloud provider.
The partnership aimed at enabling the co-development of AI computing systems. Anthropic has been utilising Google Cloud’s graphics processing unit (GPU) and tensor processing unit (TPU) clusters for training, scaling, and deploying its AI technologies.
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