The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is reportedly investigating the Alphabet Inc. (GOOG) partnership with AI startup Anthropic. Alphabet is the parent company of Google.
CMA Looking Into Alphabet’s Deal With Anthropic
According to media reports, the competition watchdog wants to determine if the partnership resulted in a “relevant merger situation” and if this would cause “substantial lessening of competition”. The CMA indicated that it invited comments from interested parties before launching its investigation.
According to CNBC, a spokesperson for Anthropic said that the company will cooperate with the regulator and “provide them with the complete picture about Google’s investment and our commercial collaboration”. The Anthropic representative added:
We are an independent company and none of our strategic partnerships or investor relationships diminish the independence of our corporate governance or our freedom to partner with others.
Similarly, Google stated that the partnership does not negatively impact competition. Google said that it is “committed to building the most open and innovative AI ecosystem in the world” and emphasised that Anthropic is “free to use multiple cloud providers and does, and we don’t demand exclusive tech rights”.
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In October 2023, Google committed to investing up to $2bn in Anthropic. This agreement entailed an upfront $500m investment, with the remaining $1.5bn to be allotted over a period of time. Google allegedly attained a 10% share in Anthropic with this investment.
Anthropic is the brains behind the chatbot Claude, which competes with Open AI’s ChatGPT. Tech leaders are hedging their bets on the latest innovations to try to stay ahead of the pack in this ultra-competitive sphere.
