US Regulators to Intensify Antitrust Scrutiny on Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia

After US regulators established an agreement to investigate the companies, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia will likely be subject to more intense antitrust examination about their activities in artificial intelligence.

According to the New York Times, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have reached an agreement to jointly investigate the major players in the artificial intelligence (AI) market. The deal is anticipated to be finalized in the next few days.

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According to the NYT, the DoJ will examine whether Nvidia, the industry leader in processors that power and train AI systems, has violated antitrust laws, which regulate fair competition in the marketplace and work to prevent monopolies.

In the meantime, Microsoft, OpenAI’s largest investor and a significant financial supporter of other AI startups, and OpenAI, the company that created the ChatGPT chatbot, will come under scrutiny from the FTC.

The Wall Street Journal also revealed that the FTC may have engineered Microsoft’s recent agreement with startup Inflection AI to evade an antitrust investigation.

UK businessman Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO and co-founder of Inflection, was appointed by Microsoft to lead a new artificial intelligence branch in March, and the company was given a $650 million (£508 million) license to use its AI software.

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The FTC has already expressed interest in the market for AI. It requested information on recent investments and collaborations with generative AI startups and cloud service providers from OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet, the company that owns Google, Amazon, and startup Anthropic in January.

It launched a probe into OpenAI last year after hearing allegations that it had violated consumer protection regulations by endangering data and personal identities.

Jonathan Kanter, the director of the Department of Justice’s antitrust division, stated to the Financial Times that the agency would investigate “monopoly choke points and the competitive landscape” in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) “with urgency.”

Kanter stated that to prevent dominant tech companies from controlling the market, regulators need to move swiftly.

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The reports were released when Nvidia’s worth surpassed Apple’s and hit $3 trillion for the first time.

Professor Rebecca Haw Allensworth of Vanderbilt Law School stated that the DoJ and FTC’s purported cooperation was indicative of a more cooperative relationship between the two organizations during the Biden administration.

“The agencies used to divide the cases based on industry, but now that this market is so big and crucial to antitrust enforcement, they are collaborating and sharing responsibility,” the speaker stated. “There’s no denying that the agencies view artificial intelligence as the next wave of anticompetitive behaviour by companies that are already perceived as stifling and avoiding competition.”

Regarding the Inflection deal, Microsoft declared that it was “confident” that it had fulfilled with antitrust duties.

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