US antitrust enforcers will investigate leading AI companies Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI
US antitrust enforcers have decided to investigate the role played by Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI artificial intelligence boomaccording to people familiar with the ongoing actions.
The Justice Department will launch an investigation into chipmaker Nvidia, while the Federal Trade Commission will scrutinize close business partners Microsoft and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, according to two people who were not authorized to publicly discuss the details of the investigations and spoke to The Associated Press spoke. on condition of anonymity.
Nvidia and OpenAI declined to comment Thursday. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The New York Times first reported Thursday about a deal between antitrust regulators at the two agencies.
Encouraged by President Joe Biden’s pushing for stricter supervision of Big Tech’s business practices, federal officials have been signaling for more than a year that they are wary of monopolistic behavior in the rapidly advancing industry of chatbots and other generative AI products that can produce human-like text, images and sound.
Lina Khan, President of the FTC, said in January that the agency would investigate deals that “enable dominant companies to exert undue influence or gain privileged access in ways that could undermine fair competition.”
The FTC said at the time it had opened an investigation into the relationships between leading artificial intelligence startups, such as OpenAI and Anthropic, and cloud computing providers such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft, which have invested billions of dollars in them.
Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI was particularly close, giving the smaller San Francisco company the vast computing resources it needed train generative AI systems such as ChatGPT.
The entire AI industry has also relied heavily on Nvidia’s specialized semiconductors to power AI applications. Demand for its AI chips has led Nvidia shares are soaringsurpassing $3 trillion in market value on Wednesday and making it one of the most valuable companies in the S&P500.
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Associated Press writer Michael Balsamo contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press and OpenAI have done so a license and technology agreement which gives OpenAI access to some of AP’s text archives.