Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority had been looking at aspects of the partnership and if it would result in Amazon “having material influence” over Anthropic. Together, the two companies control 70-80% of their market share in Britain. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI
Sept. 27 (UPI) — The British government’s business and markets regulator ruled Friday that a merger between AI company Anthropic and Amazon does not violate the Enterprise Act of 2002.
Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority had been looking at key aspects of the partnership and if it would result in Amazon “having material influence” over Anthropic as part of a so-called “quasi-merger,” which is part of a new and growing trend in the realm of artificial intelligence.
Together, the two companies control 70-80% of their market share in Britain and the CMA was looking to judge if Amazon’s stake in Anthropic had resulted or would result “in a substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services.”
“As we’ve made clear,” an Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch, “Anthropic is an independent company and our strategic partnerships and investor relationships do not diminish our corporate governance independence or our freedom to partner with others.”
The San Francisco-based Anthropic is a “public benefit corporation” which has raised around $10 billion since its founding.
Friday’s announcement by the CMA arrived six months to the day after when Amazon let it be known it had finalized a $4 billion investment in the AI startup.
But according to CMA officials, a “relevant merger situation” between Anthropic and Amazon had not been created under the 2002 Enterprise Act’s provisions, meaning the point had not been reached where it could be assessed if Amazon had attained “material influence” over Anthropic.
The CMA, according to documents, said it “did not need to reach a conclusion on material influence as the Partnership does not meet” specific criteria.
Anthropic is a three-year-old AI company that develops large language models and a “chatbox” called “Claude,” a similar virtual tool like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Bard.
Anthropic’s generative AI foundation model called Claude is capable of sophisticated dialogue and creative content generation as well as complex reasoning and detailed instruction. And Amazon’s partnership combines the AI model with AWS’s cloud technology.
Amazon is a U.S.-listed multinational company active in several business areas, CMA said.
Britain’s regulatory agency said in April that it was looking into the Amazon Anthropic deal and inviting comments from all interested parties.
In September last year, Amazon said it would pay $4 billion for a minority stake in Anthropic and would support Anthropic’s development with Amazon Web services cloud computing platforms. Anthropic also counts Google and Alphabet as investors.
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Nearly two months after in October, the British agency opened its two-year investigation into Amazon and Microsoft’s British cloud computing businesses.
Amazon called it a “strategic collaboration” and indicated that Anthropic would be using AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train and deploy its future AI models.
In Nov. 2023 CMA announced it had approved commitments from Amazon and Meta to settle unfair practices connected to their marketplaces platforms.
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