The partnership between Amazon AMZN and Jeff Bezos-backed artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, has been approved by the U.K.’s competition regulator. This approval comes despite a substantial $4 billion investment by Amazon into the startup.
What Happened: The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) of Britain has given the nod to the partnership, Reuters reported on Friday. The CMA clarified that the partnership does not fall within its jurisdiction and hence, will not be subjected to further investigation under Britain’s merger regulations. An Amazon spokesperson expressed satisfaction with the decision, acknowledging the CMA’s lack of jurisdiction over the collaboration.
The CMA has also approved a similar partnership between Microsoft Corp. and Inflection AI. However, the collaboration between Google parent Alphabet and Anthropic is still under review.
Why It Matters: Anthropic, co-founded by former OpenAI executives Dario and Daniela Amodei, has garnered billions in investments from several tech giants. The company maintains its corporate governance independence and the freedom to collaborate with others. This is significant in the current global climate where antitrust regulators are increasingly scrutinizing deals between smaller industry startups and big tech companies.
Amazon’s partnership with Anthropic has been under investigation by the CMA since August due to potential anti-competitive concerns. Despite the scrutiny, Amazon has reportedly leveraged Anthropic’s Claude AI models to revamp its voice assistant, Alexa. The new version of Alexa, set to launch in October, is designed to answer complex queries more efficiently.
Price Action: Amazon was trading 0.60% lower at the time of writing on Friday, as per Benzinga Pro.
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This story was generated using Benzinga Neuro and edited by Pooja Rajkumari
© 2024 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
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