Yesterday, the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced a merger inquiry into Google’s investment in Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup and developer of “Claude,” a line of large language models.

The following statement can be attributed to George Rakis, Executive Director for NextGen Competition (nextgencomp.tech):

We applaud the CMA’s investigation into Google’s investment in Anthropic. This inquiry is a critical step toward holding Big Tech giants accountable as these companies increasingly find ways to skirt legal scrutiny while stifling competition without formally acquiring these startups.

As generative AI startups become increasingly dependent on Big Tech for costly cloud computing infrastructure to develop and deploy their models, the risk grows that companies like Google will use this dependence to dictate terms, gaining greater control. Such 'investments' effectively create de facto subsidiaries, allowing Big Tech to steer startups away from developing products or innovations that could challenge their monopoly power. We’ve already seen Big Tech monopolize areas like app stores, social media, and cloud computing; regulators cannot allow the same for AI. This CMA inquiry is a small but significant step towards keeping Big Tech in check and ensuring that AI development remains open and competitive.

About NextGen Competition

Our mission is to support a robust and competitive technology ecosystem by opposing anti-competitive business practices and promoting greater industry accountability. Specifically, we oppose consolidation in the industry that undermines worker protections and employer accountability, threatens data privacy and security, encourages market concentration, and limits consumer choice. NextGen Competition intends to work with a broad coalition of unions and public interest partners as it seeks to oppose anti-competitive business practices.