The FTC aims to make sense of the various investments made by cloud providers into AI startups and how they affect the landscape of generative AI’s competitiveness.
Big companies including Alphabet (Google’s parent), Anthropic, Microsoft, Amazon, and OpenAI received letters from the FTC to learn more about how the investments made into AI startups affect the competitiveness of the whole generative AI landscape. When large companies invest heavily in AI startups, they can dominate and even monopolize the market with accelerated research. Google and Amazon have invested in Anthropic and Microsoft has invested in OpenAI multiple times.
The FTC aims to understand how these partnerships influence the product release cycles and oversight rights. In other words, how much control do these investor companies really have? Furthermore, the Commission also wishes to understand how these partnerships will affect market share, competition, and the potential for sales growth in the entire generative AI sector.
The Verge reported on this yesterday with Microsoft’s comment that “The US has assumed a global AI leadership position because important American companies are working together. Partnerships between independent companies like Microsoft and OpenAI, as well as among many others, are promoting competition and accelerating innovation. We look forward to providing the FTC with the information it needs to complete its study.”
From Amazon’s $4 billion into Anthropic and Google’s 10% stake in the same to Microsoft’s close partnership with OpenAI including joining the board and a rumored $10 billion investment, these cloud service providers have invested heavily into AI startups. And the results are in. Anthropic and OpenAI have both come up with revolutionary products and keep updating their models and tools
