UK CMA is Investigating Amazon’s Partnership With AI Startup Anthropic

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced today the launch of a formal investigation into Amazon’s partnership with the US-based AI startup Anthropic. Amazon invested $4 billion into the company earlier this year, which was the largest outside investment in Amazon’s corporate history.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former members of OpenAI. The startup is known for its “Claude” family of AI models, and the latest version released in June 2024, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, competes with the best-in-class models from competitors such as OpenAI and Google. Anthropic is currently using Amazon AWS as its primary cloud provider, and it’s also available on Amazon Bedrock, the company’s platform for building generative AI applications.

“The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is considering whether it is or may be the case that Amazon’s partnership with Anthropic has resulted in the creation of a relevant merger situation under the merger provisions of the Enterprise Act 2002 and, if so, whether the creation of that situation has resulted, or may be expected to result, in a substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services,” the UK’s CMA said today.

The UK regulator has until October 4, 2024 to announce if its investigation will carry on with a more in-depth “Phase 2” inquiry. In the meantime, the CMA is inviting interested parties to share their comments on the situation.

Speaking with the Financial Times, Amazon has already said that its partnership with Anthropic “does not raise any competition concerns or meet the CMA’s own threshold for review”. The company added that “By investing in Anthropic, Amazon, along with other companies, is helping Anthropic expand choice and competition in this important technology.”

This new merger inquiry from the CMA comes just a couple of weeks after the UK regulator started investigating Microsoft’s hiring of key staff from Inflection AI. However, the Amazon/Anthropic situation isn’t exactly comparable as Anthropic also reveiced a mullti-billion investment from Google, which also made Anthropic’s Claude 3 models available on its Vertex AI platform. “We are an independent company,” Anthropic told the Financial Times. “Our strategic partnerships and investor relationships do not diminish our corporate governance independence or our freedom to partner with others.”