U.K.The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) issued a statement on July 16 saying it was investigatingMicrosoftemployment-related Inflection AI Some of the former employees and the related arrangements with Inflection. The regulator was concerned that this could lead to a "substantial lessening of competition".
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In a statement, the CMA said the deadline for making a Phase I decision is Sept. 11, at which time the agency will announce whether it will move the case to a second phase of an in-depth investigation.
In April this year, the CMA said it was seeking public comment on an investigation into a series of tech giants' deals with AI startups, including Microsoft's deal with Inflection AI, Microsoft's deal with Mistral AI, and Amazon's deal with Anthropic. Mistral AI is said to have recently raised $643 million in funding, valuing it at $6 billion.
In March, Microsoft announced the hiring of Inflection AI co-founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan, with Suleyman leading Microsoft's consumer AI division. In addition, Microsoft has recruited most of Inflection AI's employees and said it will pay it about $650 million in licensing fees for access to its technology.
As part of the management change, Suleyman is now leading teams at Microsoft focused on Copilot, Bing and Edge.
As reported in June, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is also investigating whether the deal between Microsoft and Inflection AI was deliberately designed to circumvent government scrutiny.
Microsoft has invested in a number of AI startups in recent years, including billions of dollars in OpenAI, the creator of chatbot ChatGPT.