The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has cleared Alphabet's partnership with and investment in AI rival Anthropic, concluding that the company is not subject to investigation under current merger rules.
The announcement marks the start of a formal “Stage 1” investigation by the CMA into Google's parent company's various investments in Anthropic, a three-year-old San Francisco-based startup that develops large-scale language models (LLMs) and related chatbots. This took place one month after the company announced that it would start. It's similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's own Bard, and is called Claude.
Alphabet reportedly invested $300 million in Anthropic early last year and has since invested another $2 billion.
Anthropic was courting other big names in the technology industry, including Amazon, which invested $4 billion in the deal. The CMA had also considered the partnership, but reached the same conclusion with Alphabet in September, announcing that it could not investigate the deal under current merger rules because of its size and scope.
These various studies form part of a multifaceted investigation into what has been termed “quasi-mergers,” in which Big Tech companies seek to dominate young innovators through hiring startup founders and talent. approach. This is where making strategic investments comes into play.
However, the CMA currently said it “does not consider that Google has gained significant influence over Anthropic as a result of the partnership.” More specifically, the CMA will consider whether the commercial relationship between the two companies means that Google can exercise influence at board level, and also their technological dependence on Google's infrastructure (such as cloud computing resources). The company said it considered whether it could play a role in inhibiting competition.
“The available evidence does not indicate that Google has the ability to exercise significant influence over Anthropic through the partnership,” the CMA noted.
Furthermore, because Anthropic's UK turnover does not exceed £70 million, Anthropic does not meet the so-called “turnover test” for the investigation.