The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has invited comments on a number of tie-ups between major tech firms and artificial intelligence startups.

The regulator on Wednesday said that it had opened invitations to comment (ITCs) for interested third parties to give their views on “whether the partnerships between Microsoft and Mistral AI, and Amazon and Anthropic, as well as Microsoft’s hiring of former employees and related arrangements with Inflection AI, fall within UK merger rules and the impact that these arrangements could have on competition in the UK”.

The ITCs are the first part of the CMA’s information gathering process, and come in advance of the launch of formal Phase 1 reviews. The CMA said that an ITC does not start the formal Phase 1 review, and that it does necessarily mean it has jurisdiction to launch an investigation. Interested parties have until 9 May to submit their comments.

The regulator recently published a report highlighting three key interlinked risks to open, fair and effective competition in the markets for AI Foundation Models (FMs), specifically around partnerships involving players that “could be exacerbating existing positions of market power through the FMs value chain”.

It identified an “interconnected web” of over 90 partnerships and strategic investments involving the same firms and while not all partnerships or arrangements will fall within the merger rules, those that do “may give rise to competition concerns in the UK”, the CMA said.

Joel Bamford, executive director of mergers at the CMA, said: “Foundation Models have the potential to fundamentally impact the way we all live and work, including products and services across so many UK sectors – healthcare, energy, transport, finance and more.

“So open, fair, and effective competition in Foundation Model markets is critical to making sure the full benefits of this transformation are realised by people and businesses in the UK, as well as our wider economy where technology has a huge role to play in growth and productivity.”

Regulators are increasingly focusing on the relationship between established big tech players and AI startups, with Microsoft’s $13 billion investment in ChatGPT maker OpenAI coming under significant scrutiny in particular. The Windows company has a non-voting board position at the company but has maintained that it has no influence over its strategy or operations.

While that relationship in particular is not part of this CMA ITC, the European Commission is reportedly eyeing a probe into the partnership. https://www.nationaltechnology.co.uk/EU_Could_Launch_Probe_Into_Microsoft_OpenAI_Partnership_Claims_Report.php

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) earlier this year opened investigations into “the investments and partnerships being formed between AI developers and major cloud service providers,” with Amazon, Google and Microsoft specifically targeted along with OpenAI and Antropic, the maker of the Claude generative AI platform.

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