Britain’s antitrust Competition and Markets Authority Thursday officially launched an investigation into whether Amazon’s deal with AI company Anthropic violates Britain’s Enterprise Act of 2002. Phase 1 of the probe will last until Oct. 4. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI | License Photo
Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority said Thursday it is investigating whether Amazon’s merger with the AI company Anthropic violates the Enterprise Act of 2002.
Amazon could be punished if the CMA finds that its stake in Anthropic has resulted or may be expected to result “in a substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services.” Advertisement
Phase 1 of the investigation will last until Oct. 4, a deadline for a decision on whether to proceed to a second investigation phase.
The CMA gave notice in April that it was looking into the Amazon Anthropic deal and inviting comments from all interested parties.
Thursday’s official notice launched the merger inquiry.
Amazon said in September 2023 it would pay $4 billion for a minority stake in Anthropic and would support Anthropic’s development with Amazon Web services cloud computing platforms.
Amazon called it a “strategic collaboration” and indicated that Anthropic would be using AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy its future AI models.
Anthropic’s generative AI foundation model called Claude is capable of sophisticated dialogue and creative content generation as well as complex reasoning and detailed instruction. Advertisement
Amazon’s partnership combines that AI model with AWS’s cloud technology.
In Oct. 2023 the CMA opened a two-year investigation into Amazon and Microsoft’s British cloud computing businesses.
Together the companies have a 70-80% market share in Britain.
In Nov. 2023 CMA announced it had approved commitments from Amazon and Meta to settle unfair practices connected to their marketplaces platforms.
