Imran Rahman-Jones
Technological journalist
Getty
OPENAI Boss Sam Altman (left) and Microsoft Boss Satya Nadella
The Watchdog of the British competition ended its survey on the partnership between Microsoft and the manufacturer of Chatgpt, Openai.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) sought whether Microsoft’s relationship with what is the most famous artificial intelligence (IA) company in the world changed after the turmoil that saw its boss Sam Altman, then rehired.
The CMA concluded that, despite Microsoft investing billions of dollars in Openai and having exclusive uses of some of its AI products, the partnership remains the same, it is therefore not subject to the examination under the merger rules of the United Kingdom.
Digital rights activists, Foxglove, said that it showed that the AMC had been “defused”.
The CMA opened the probe in December 2023, after Microsoft exerted pressure on Openai to re -use Mr. Altman, a few days after being dismissed.
“Given Microsoft’s potentially important role in securing Sam Altman’s reassessment, the CMA thought that there was a reasonable chance that a survey reveals that Microsoft had increased its control over Openai trade policy,” said the guard dog.
But Wednesday, he concluded that Microsoft “has a high level of material influence” on OpenAi’s commercial policy without completely controlling it.
“Because this change of control did not take place, the partnership in its current form is not eligible for the examination of the Mussement Control Diet of the United Kingdom,” published the executive director of the CMA for mergers Joel Bamford in an article on LinkedIn.
But he added: “The conclusions of the CMA on the court must not be read as the partnership given a specific health note on potential competition problems; but the British mergers’ control regime must of course operate in the context of the delivery loosened by the Parliament.”
‘Nothing to see here’
Critics say, however, that the decision is linked to the changed political environment in which the CMA now operates.
The government has asked the country’s regulators to suggest means to stimulate economic growth.
In January, the government withdrew the president of the CMA at the time, Marcus Bokkerink, because he was not satisfied with his response to this call.
He was replaced interim by Doug Gurr, former boss of Amazon UK.
“The CMA has been sitting on this decision for more than a year, but in just a few weeks after the installation of an former Amazon boss as president, he decided that everything was going well all along, nothing to do here,” said Foxglove Co-Executive Director Rosa Curling.
“It is a bad sign that Big Tech successfully convinced the Prime Minister to challenge our competition regulator and leave Big Tech engulfing the current generation of advanced technologies-just as they did,” she told the BBC.
When BBC News contacted the CMA for a response to these comments, they told us the LinkedIn post of Mr. Bamford, where he said: “We are not blind to the duration that this investigation took … We know that the pace of business and investment.”
He added that the reason why this investigation took so long was that the relationship between Microsoft and Openai changed during this period.
Less than a year ago, the CMA Director General Sarah Cardell said the body had “real concerns” concerning an “interconnected web” of AI partnerships between large technological companies.
But in a set of CMA instructions published in February, the government said it should prioritize “pro-growth and pro-investment interventions”.
In the same month, the United Kingdom ranked on the United States by not signing an AI agreement at a summit in Paris.
US vice-president JD Vance had told delegates that too much AI regulation could “kill a transformative industry just as it takes off”.
“The CMA will adopt a less interventionist approach to protect competition and to merge control exams, (but) this does not mean that the AMC will approve each transaction that has been presented to it without any doubt,” said Chloe Birkett, competition lawyer in the free law firm.
“The aim of the AMC is to help preserve competition on the markets to ensure that consumers get a fair agreement,” she said.
Additional report by Tom Singleton and Chris Vallance.
