U.S. regulators to open antitrust probes into Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI
The Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department are set to open antitrust investigations into Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia, examining the powerful companies’ influence on the artificial intelligence industry, a source familiar confirmed to CNBC.
The Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department are set to open antitrust investigations into Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia, examining the powerful companies’ influence on the artificial intelligence industry, a source familiar confirmed to CNBC.
The FTC will take the lead on looking into Microsoft and OpenAI, while the DOJ will focus on Nvidia, and the investigations will focus on the companies’ conduct, rather than mergers and acquisitions, according to the source.
The New York Times first reported on the investigation.
As startups like OpenAI and Anthropic — the companies behind the ChatGPT and Claude chatbots, respectively — gain steam in the generative AI market, tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta have been part of an AI arms race of sorts, racing to integrate the technology to ensure they don’t fall behind in a market that’s predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.
Microsoft, for instance, first invested $1 billion into OpenAI in 2019. The size of its investment has since swelled to about $13 billion. Microsoft heavily uses OpenAI’s model for its Copilot chatbot and offers open-source models on its Azure cloud.
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