UK clears Amazon’s AI partnership with Anthropic

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(Reuters) – Britain’s competition regulator said on Friday Amazon’s artificial intelligence partnership with startup Anthropic will not be referred for a deeper probe as it did not fall under its jurisdiction.

The Competition and Markets Authority said the partnership, which includes a $4 billion investment by Amazon in Anthropic, did not qualify for investigation under Britain’s merger regulations.

“We welcome the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) decision acknowledging its lack of jurisdiction regarding this collaboration,” an Amazon spokesperson said in response to the regulator’s decision.

The regulator has also cleared a similar collaboration between Microsoft and Inflection AI.

However, Alphabet’s partnership with Anthropic is still under scrutiny.

“Anthropic is an independent company and our strategic partnerships and investor relationships do not diminish our corporate governance independence or freedom to partner with others,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Reuters on Friday.

Anthropic, which was co-founded by former OpenAI executives and siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, has received billions of dollars in investments from several tech giants.

Antitrust regulators around the world have increasingly raised concerns over multiple deals struck between smaller industry startups and big tech companies.

(This story has been corrected to say that the probe was stopped as it was not under the regulator’s jurisdiction, 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)