Amazon’s $4 billion investment in US artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is to be scrutinised in the latest investigation into tech partnerships by the UK’s competition watchdog.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said on Thursday it was launching a preliminary investigation into the deal, before deciding whether to refer it for an in-depth review.
The deal, announced in March, included a $4bn (£3.16bn) investment in Anthropic by Amazon, and a commitment by Anthropic to use Amazon Web Services “as its primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, including security research and development of future cloud models”.
The regulator said it was “considering whether it is or may be the case that Amazon’s partnership with Anthropic has resulted in the creation of a relevant merger situation.”
An Anthropic spokesperson said: “We are an independent company. Our strategic alliances and investor relationships do not undermine our independence in corporate governance or our freedom to partner with others.
“Amazon does not have a seat on Anthropic’s board or any board observation rights. We intend to cooperate with the CMA and provide them with a comprehensive understanding of Amazon’s investment and our business collaboration.”
An Amazon spokesperson said: “We are disappointed that the UK CMA has not yet completed its investigation. Amazon’s collaboration with Anthropic does not raise any competition concerns nor does it meet the CMA’s own threshold for review.”
“In the early days of generative AI, customers had only one successful option available to them. Anthropic has worked hard to become a viable emerging alternative. However, building models is expensive, and companies like Anthropic need access to a substantial amount of capital to train these models.”
Amazon said its investment would help increase competition in the emerging sector and that Anthropic was “free to work with any other supplier (and indeed has multiple partners).”
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Last week, the CMA announced a nearly identical investigation into Google’s partnership with Anthropic. It is also looking into Microsoft’s unusually structured partnerships with artificial intelligence lab Inflection and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.
A CMA investigation into a deal between Microsoft and French artificial intelligence startup Mistral was dropped in May.