The UK Competition Authority Should Investigate the AI Partnerships now

13 May 2024

ICCL Enforce along with ally civil society organisations made a joint submission to the CMA, the UK's competition authority, on three AI partnerships: Microsoft/Inflection, Microsoft/Mistral, and Amazon/Anthropic. The CMA should investigate all these partnerships and assess their effects on the whole AI sector and ecosystem. Now is the time. Any delay could result in a repeat of market concentration we have seen in the search, browser and cloud ecosystem.

While our January submission was specific to the Microsoft/OpenAI partnership, this submission covers:

1. Why these partnerships between AI companies should be investigated;
   
   
2. Specific issues with each partnership; and
   
   
3. Ways forward for the CMA to preserve competition in the AI sector.

See ICCLs related work on artificial intelligence.