In this photo illustration, the Alphabet Inc. logo appears on a smartphone screen and the Google logo appears in the background.
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Britain’s competition watchdog said on Tuesday it was investigating whether Google’s parent company alphabetical A partnership with artificial intelligence startup Anthropic reduces competition.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it was investigating whether the collaboration between the two companies resulted in “relevant merger circumstances” and whether this “could result in a significant lessening of competition in the UK”
The regulator sought input from interested parties before launching a formal investigation.
Alphabet and Anthropic did not immediately comment when contacted by CNBC.
Google agreed back in October to invest up to $2 billion in Anthropic, a move that involved an upfront cash injection of $500 million and an additional $1.5 billion over time. This builds on Google’s previous investment in the company, which reportedly took a roughly 10% stake in the artificial intelligence startup.
Anthropic is the developer of Claude, a rival chatbot to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Amid the global craze for artificial intelligence technology, American giants have been actively investing in companies they believe can lead the field of artificial intelligence.
Anthropic is one of them. Amazon, for example, committed up to $4 billion to Anthropic last year.
However, regulators in the United States and the United Kingdom are increasingly concerned about tech giants’ investments in smaller companies.
The CMA said in April that it was investigating partnerships between: Microsoft Established partnership with French artificial intelligence company Mistral Amazon and Anthropic, as well as former employees hired by Microsoft to work on Inflection AI.
– CNBC’s Hayden Field and Ryan Brown contributed to this report.
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