The FTC aims to expose the complex and secretive partnerships at the top artificial intelligence companies out there in a new investigation. Orders have been shipped to Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft and OpenAI which, as President Lina Khan said, “will shine a light on whether investments and partnerships pursued by dominant companies risk distorting innovation and undermining fair competition ».
No offense is alleged at this stage. But it’s a little suspicious when companies that are already under investigation for antitrust practices, or have been fined or settled over them, are apparently working to lock up the next big technology for their own use.
This is evident in the split between Anthropic (backed by Google and Amazon at billion dollar levels) and OpenAI (backed by Microsoft at billion dollar levels). What are these companies but a proxy for the ambitions of existing technological superpowers?
Or at least, so it appears to the layman and to the FTC, which has learned to detect the early stages of market power in development.
“History shows that new technologies can create new markets and healthy competition. As companies race to deploy and monetize AI, we must guard against tactics that foreclose this opportunity,” Khan continued in her statement.
Orders sent to the companies listed above require them to share:
- Partnerships, investments and the “strategic rationale” for them.
- Whether these partnerships have “practical implications,” such as when or how new products are released.
- What do they discuss in meetings?
- Any analysis they have done on the competitive impact of these transactions on competition, market share, etc.
- How partnerships shape competition for AI-specific resources (like computing power, presumably).
- Anything provided to other government agencies (foreign or domestic) about these things.
No doubt this will be laughed off by the companies in question as a fishing expedition in perfectly good business relations. After all, why shouldn’t companies that have already spent billions pursuing AI spend a little more to back promising — but diametrically opposed — new challengers?
After the publication, Microsoft told TechCrunch in a statement that the OpenAI deal “fosters competition and accelerates innovation” — you can be the judge of whether you think that’s accurate. Google, for its part, seized the opportunity to wipe out Microsoft with a passive-aggressive swipe at its strategy. Both say they welcome the investigation.
By the way, today the FTC is hosting a summit on artificial intelligence and its opportunities and risks, in the sense of markets and startups. In her opening remarks, Khan noted that training AI models “further incentivizes surveillance,” which of course is the business model adopted by Google, Meta, et al. over the past decade or so, and that companies “cannot use claims of innovation as cover for breaking the law.”
To paraphrase a saying, a search in time saves nine down the line. Whether this leads to further action on the Commission’s part is anyone’s guess at this point, but the investigation serves as a notice that these companies are being watched.
