If the retail giant has invested $4 billion here it may just be planning some sort of a merger.
Anthropic in the antitrust lens: their investment by Amazon
Thus, Anthropic and its links to Amazon have attracted the attention of the United Kingdom’s antitrust authority. This has transpired at the instance of Amazon which invested $4 billion in this firm.
Anthropic: the largest artificial intelligence start-up
Thus, Anthropic occupies a favorable position in the market as a creator of the virtual assistant “Claude.” However this particular mix between this start-up and the e-commerce giant causes certain apprehensions which leads to the involvement of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). Therefore, the research question of this investigation is to determine whether the above mentioned investment can be classified as a merger by compliance with the existing standards. If so, the examination will proceed to the next level of asking whether such a merger would reduce competitiveness in the UK market.
The war of “quasi-mergers”
However, Amazon is not the only one sitting on the defendant’s chair. There are also regulations on Google and Microsoft for partnership with Anthropic and OpenAI. It seems that regulators are especially worried about ‘quasi-mergers’ under which huge firms obtain inexpedient access to start-ups either as investors, or as magnet drawing in the talent. On theoretical terms it facilitates the original company to enjoy all the benefits of merger without it getting merged.
The position of the companies concerned depends on the reliance of its customers and performance records that exhibit good management and healthy corporate financial statements.
In its turn, Amazon stressed that it does not accumulate a majority stake in Anthropic, and refutes anticompetitive threats. In the same manner, Anthropic stresses this, saying that Amazon, for example, does not have any voice in the company as it does not have any seats in its board of directors; the company does not even have any rights to shadow the proceedings, too. This is is the current position of both firms to the effect that they are willing and prepared to engage the CMA to enable the supply of more detailed information regarding the trade association in question.
This case once again underlines the increasing requirement of specifically regulating that state at which massive internet conglomerates and AI start-ups can interface in progressively intricate and authoritative ways.