Following its update paper into AI foundation models (commented upon previously here) which raised concerns about the effects on competition of the small number of companies in the market and the growing partnerships between them, the Competition and Markets Authority (“CMA”) has opened invitations to comment on a number of such relationships.

The CMA invites comments from interested third parties on three matters in particular. The first is Amazon’s partnership with Anthropic, by which Amazon will become “the primary cloud provider for certain workloads of Anthropic, including agreements for purchasing computing capacity and non-exclusive commitments to make Anthropic available on Amazon Bedrock”. The second relates to the partnership between Microsoft and Mistral AI, which includes Microsoft supplying Mistral AI with its Azure supercomputing infrastructure and committing to make Mistral AI’s models available on the Azure platform. The third invitation to comment also concerns Microsoft, this time relating to its hiring of former employees of Inflection AI (including its co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman), as well as “related arrangements” between the companies, including a non-exclusive licensing deal that would allow Microsoft to use Inflection AI’s existing models.

The CMA stresses that it has not formed any conclusions on whether these arrangements fall within UK merger rules or raise competition concerns in the UK, and invite comments by no later than 9 May 2024.

To read the announcement from the CMA, click here.