Amazon’s investment in AI company Anthropic has caught the attention of competition authorities. It seems a late response to investments announced back in 2023, but authorities waited until the money was fully transferred to Anthropic.
Now that Amazon has offered the last pennies of its $4 billion (€3.71 billion) investment in Anthropic, U.K. antitrust regulators are sceptical about the close relationship between the two companies. Therefore, an investigation into possible interference by Amazon in Anthropic’s dealings is being opened.
The first phase of the investigation is opened, which gives the authority 40 working days to determine whether the investment meets the rules for opening an investigation. During this phase, the institution also examines whether competitors in the UK are adversely affected by the investment.
Matching quality of OpenAI
The investment was completed in a short time: the announcement was made in September 2023, and in March 2024, Amazon transferred the final 2.55 billion euros. For the AI company, this was the first time a large company agreed to invest such a significant number. Not much later, Google followed suit with a $2 billion investment. Since last week, this financial contribution has been the subject of investigation by the same authority: the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Salesforce and Mento Ventures further filled the pot, which eventually included 6.8 billion to further develop AI.
Through the partnership, Amazon was able to make Anthropic’s latest models always available on Bedrock. The AI company is the developer of Claude models. These models reach the level of OpenAI’s models in benchmark tests or even perform better.
Custom CMA
Incidentally, the CMA opens an inquiry into any partnership between a big tech company and an AI startup. The fate of the partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft is no different. Only Microsoft’s investment in French company Mistral AI escapes the dance, as the amount of 15 million euros was too low to open an official investigation.
Also read: Claude 3.5 Sonnet: Anthropic once again beats OpenAI and Google