(Reuters) – Britain’s competition regulator said on Friday that Amazon’s artificial intelligence partnership with startup Anthropic would not be further investigated because it did not fall within its remit.
The Competition and Markets Authority said the partnership, which includes a $4 billion investment by Amazon in Anthropic, was not eligible for investigation under UK merger regulations.
“We welcome the UK Competition and Markets Authority’s (CMA) decision recognizing its lack of jurisdiction over this collaboration,” an Amazon spokesperson said in response to the regulator’s decision.
The regulator also authorized a similar collaboration between Microsoft and Inflection AI.
However, the partnership between Alphabet and Anthropic is still under scrutiny.
“Anthropic is an independent company and our strategic partnerships and investor relationships do not diminish our independence in corporate governance or our freedom to collaborate with others,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Reuters on Friday. Reuters.
Anthropic, co-founded by former OpenAI executives and siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, has received billions of dollars in investment from several tech giants.
Antitrust regulators around the world have increasingly expressed concerns about multiple deals between small industrial startups and large technology companies.
(This story has been corrected to say the investigation was stopped because it fell outside the regulator’s remit, and it also removes references to competition concerns in paragraph 1)
(Reporting by Prerna Bedi in Bengaluru; additional reporting by Yamini Kalia; editing by Shreya Biswas)