The UK’s competition authority, the CMA, announced on Wednesday that it was ending its investigation into Microsoft’s hiring of several employees from the start-up Inflection AI, considering that it did not risk harming competition. “The CMA considered that the transaction did not give rise to a realistic prospect of a substantial reduction in competition.”the regulator said in its decision, which ends a preliminary investigation opened in mid-July.
Mustafa Suleyman, one of the biggest names in the artificial intelligence revolution, announced in March that he was leaving his role as CEO of Inflection, a startup he co-founded, to join Microsoft, adding that some key employees at his company, including co-founder Karen Simonyan, had also left. “chose to join” the American giant. Microsoft had defended itself in mid-July against any hindrance to competition, considering that “recruiting talent” could not be “treated as a merger”.
The CMA, but also the European Commission in the EU or the American competition authority (FTC), have been stepping up their surveillance of the generative artificial intelligence (AI) market for several months. The British regulator announced in May that it was giving free rein to another operation concerning Microsoft: its partnership with Mistral AI, unveiled in February, concerning the French company’s conversational AI. However, in August it opened a preliminary investigation into Amazon’s multi-billion dollar investment in Anthropic, which is developing a competitor to ChatGPT. The CMA has given itself until October 4 to decide whether the operation should give rise to a more in-depth investigation.
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