UK competition regulator to investigate Alphabet’s investment in Anthropic
The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is launching a formal probe into Alphabet's investment in AI rival, Anthropic.
The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is launching a formal probe into Alphabet’s investment in AI rival Anthropic.
The investigation comes three months after the CMA confirmed it was inviting “interested parties” to comment on Alphabet’s various investments in Anthropic, which includes a reported $300 million early last year followed by another reported $2 billion.
The probe being launched now is part of a multi-pronged investigation designed to tackle the so-called quasi-merger, which has seen Big Tech firms take a fresh approach to gaining control of innovative young startups by, for example, hiring startup founders and technical talent, as well as making strategic investments.
Beyond Alphabet’s own investments in Anthropic, the 3-year-old San Francisco startup has been courting other big-name investors, including Amazon, which has invested $4 billion in the startup. The CMA had been sniffing around that partnership, too, but last month it concluded that it couldn’t investigate the deal under current merger rules due to the size and scope of the deal.
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