UK CMA Clears Amazon, Anthropic Partnership – Source: www.databreachtoday.com

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
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Geo Focus: The United Kingdom
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Geo-Specific

Akshaya Asokan (asokan_akshaya) •
September 27, 2024    

The U.K. antitrust regulator called off an investigation into the March $4 billion deal between Amazon and artificial intelligence firm Anthropic.

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The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority launched a probe in August after Amazon in March made a $4 billion investment in the San Francisco-based AI safety and research start–up. Under the deal, the companies announced Amazon Web Services will be the “primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads,” for Anthropic.

The U.K. CMA investigated whether the deal was a “relevant merger situation,” and that the partnership resulted in “Amazon having material influence over Anthropic.”

The agency said Friday that the agreement falls below the threshold of its jurisdiction, since Anthropic earns less than 70 million annual revenue in the United Kingdom and accounts for less than a quarter of the market.

“Amazon’s partnership with Anthropic does not qualify for investigation under the merger provisions of the Enterprise Act 2002,” the regulator said.

The agency is still actively considering whether to deepen a probe into an Anthropic partnership computing giant Alphabet, parent company of Google.

Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta and Apple – collectively dubbed the GAMMA firms – are ubiquitous across the foundational model value chain, giving them an outsized presence in offering compute or data resources, Sarah Cardell, the U.K. CMA head said last year (see: UK Markets Authority Warns of AI Market Capture by Big Tech).

AI market has a “winner takes all” dynamics with the larger firms “leveraging their core market power to obstruct new entrant,” Cardell added.

The U.K. CMA last year announced a probe into Microsoft’s $13 billion investments in the generative AI model maker OpenAI for potential anti-competition behavior (see: UK Market Regulator Reviews Microsoft’s Interest in OpenAI).