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Last October, Google agreed to invest $2bn in Anthropic, which included a $500m initial cash infusion and an additional $1.5bn over time.
Google parent Alphabet is under scrutiny in the UK for its ties to AI start-up Anthropic and whether they are in breach of competition laws in the country.
Anthropic is the creator of Claude, a generative AI model that in close competition with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It was founded by former OpenAI employees and siblings Daniela and Dario Amodei in 2021.
The start-up based in San Francisco is backed by industry heavyweights such as Amazon, Google and Salesforce.
Last October, Google agreed to invest $2bn in Anthropic, which included a $500m initial cash infusion and an additional $1.5bn over time. Earlier that year, Google invested $300m in the company for a 10pc stake. Around the same time, Anthropic agreed to make Google Cloud its “preferred cloud provider” with the companies “co-develop[ing] AI computing systems”.
Now, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is probing whether Alphabet’s partnership with Anthropic has created what is known as a “relevant merger situation” that can lead to a “substantial lessening of competition” in the UK market.
In a statement published today (30 July), the CMA invited comments on the partnership from “any interested party” ahead of the launch of a formal investigation. It set 13 August as the deadline for comments.
Amazon also announced plans to invest up to $4bn in Anthropic and that its cloud business, Amazon Web Services, would be the primary cloud provider for the start-up.
Earlier this year, Anthropic debuted a trio of tools called Claude 3 Opus, Haiku and Sonnet, claiming that the suite sets new industry benchmarks across a wide range of cognitive tasks. The company also has plans to open its first EU office in Dublin.
The competition probe comes just two weeks after the CMA launched a investigation into whether Microsoft hiring former employees of Inflection AI and other deals between the two parties has implications relevant to a merger situation.
Microsoft, which like Google has been pumping billions into AI development, hired former Inflection and DeepMind scientist Jordan Hoffman to lead a new AI hub in London. Other hires include Inflection co-founders Karén Simonyan and Mustafa Suleyman, the latter of whom was hired by Microsoft to head its overall AI business.
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