Amazon will be officially investigated in the United Kingdom for its US$4 billion (R$22.4 billion) investment in AI firm Anthropic, which created LLM Claude. The United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced on Thursday (8) that it would open an investigation into the case. The agency questions whether Amazon's investment amounts to an acquisition of Anthropic.
Big tech invests in AI company in September 2023 At that time, the first contribution was US$1.25 billion (R$7 billion) and the rest was made in the following months. In the investment announcement, Amazon confirmed that it will hold a stake in Anthropic and that the company will use AWS for its services.
Amazon is defending itself against the allegation
Amazon says its stake in Anthropic is not equivalent to a majority stake in the AI company. AI Company released a note TechCrunch Anthropic maintains that it is an independent company and that Amazon is not a member of its board.
The CMA is expected to conclude the inquiry by October, when the process will be completed. As the agency itself explains, the investigation time can be extended. Days before the announcement, the agency opened a similar proceeding to better understand Google's investment in Anthropic.
Artificial intelligence firm Claude developed the language model used in its generative AI of the same name. Recently, the Claude chatbot was launched in Brazil and Portuguese. Already on Tuesday, Anthropic hired OpenAI founder John Schulman.
CMA looks after the larger technology strategy
One thing that has caught the CMA's attention in recent times is the hiring of staff from investee companies. The strategy goes like this: A company makes a big investment in a company and after a few months hires some employees – from directors to people in the technical area.
The CMA and other regulatory bodies (the FTC investigates the same investments) do not look favorably on this practice because it can be characterized as an antitrust and monopolistic practice. After all, these are companies with a lot of financial power investing in promising companies.
With information: Financial Times, on the edge This is TechCrunch
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