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The UK’s competition regulator is probing Alphabet’s investment in AI startup Anthropic. After public comments this summer, the Competition and Market Authority (CMA) on Thursday it has “sufficient information” to begin an initial investigation into whether Alphabet’s reported $2.3 billion investment in harms competition in UK markets.
The CMA breaks its merger probes into two stages: a preliminary scan to determine whether there’s enough evidence to dig deeper and an optional second phase where the government gathers as much evidence as possible. After the second stage, it ultimately decides on a regulatory outcome.
The probe will formally kick off on Friday. By December 19, the CMA will choose whether to move to a phase 2 investigation.
Engadget reached out to Google and the CMA. We’ll update this story if we hear back.
TechCrunch that Alphabet reportedly invested $300 million in Anthropic in early 2023. Later that year, it was said to back the AI startup with an additional $2 billion. Situations like this can be classified as a “quasi-merger,” where deep-pocketed tech companies essentially take control of emerging startups through strategic investments and hiring founders and technical workers.
Amazon has : a whopping $4 billion. After , the CMA to investigate that investment last month. The CMA said Amazon avoided Alphabet’s fate at least in part because of its current rules: Anthropic’s UK turnover didn’t exceed £70 million, and the two parties didn’t combine to account for 25 percent or more of the region’s supply (in this case, AI LLMs and chatbots).
Although the CMA hasn’t specified, something in Alphabet’s $2.3 billion Anthropic investment constituted a deeper dive. Of course, competes with Claude, and both companies make large language models they and enterprise customers.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at
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The CMA breaks its merger probes into two stages: a preliminary scan to determine whether there’s enough evidence to dig deeper and an optional second phase where the government gathers as much evidence as possible. After the second stage, it ultimately decides on a regulatory outcome.
The probe will formally kick off on Friday. By December 19, the CMA will choose whether to move to a phase 2 investigation.
Engadget reached out to Google and the CMA. We’ll update this story if we hear back.
TechCrunch that Alphabet reportedly invested $300 million in Anthropic in early 2023. Later that year, it was said to back the AI startup with an additional $2 billion. Situations like this can be classified as a “quasi-merger,” where deep-pocketed tech companies essentially take control of emerging startups through strategic investments and hiring founders and technical workers.
Amazon has : a whopping $4 billion. After , the CMA to investigate that investment last month. The CMA said Amazon avoided Alphabet’s fate at least in part because of its current rules: Anthropic’s UK turnover didn’t exceed £70 million, and the two parties didn’t combine to account for 25 percent or more of the region’s supply (in this case, AI LLMs and chatbots).
Although the CMA hasn’t specified, something in Alphabet’s $2.3 billion Anthropic investment constituted a deeper dive. Of course, competes with Claude, and both companies make large language models they and enterprise customers.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at
Console Bang News!