The UK's Competition and Markets Authority looks for comments on the Anthropic-Google partnership

As the quasi-merger and other M&A practices designed to keep the attention away from the parties involved continue to gain traction, scrutiny by antitrust regulators is finally on the rise. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority has been particularly active for the last couple of months, starting in April, when it published invitations to comment on the arrangements between Amazon and Anthropic, Microsoft and Mistral AI, and Microsoft and Inflection AI. Now the CMA is following up on its recent activity by opening an invitation to comment on the partnership between Google and Anthropic

Of the cases it opened in April, the CMA has officially closed the investigation on the partnership between Microsoft and Mistral AI after establishing it does not qualify for investigation under the UK's regulation. More notably, the regulator has officially opened a Phase 1 investigation on Microsoft's deal with Inflection AI. Now that the investigation has started, the CMA will gather information to determine whether the arrangement should have been managed as a merger. If the deal does count as a merger, the CMA will probe further to determine whether the deal could negatively impact competition in the UK's AI market.

The CMA's case on Amazon and Anthropic remains tellingly open as the regulator announces its latest invitation to comment on the partnership between Google and Anthropic. Anthropic, one of OpenAI's strongest competitors and the developers of the chatbot Claude, received $2.3 billion in investments from Google spanning two funding rounds. The 2023 $2 billion investment round also featured an agreement enabling Anthropic to leverage the Google Cloud computing infrastructure.

Google and Anthropic spokespeople have declared that the arrangement is not a merger. Anthropic has remarked that none of its arrangements have diminished its independence or freedom to partner with other firms. Google has emphasized that it never demanded exclusive rights as a product of the partnership with Anthropic.