Euro Monopoly Watchdogs Bare Their Teeth Anew at Microsoft-OpenAI Deal
By Kelvin Chan
FILE- The OpenAI logo is displayed on a cell phone with an image on a computer monitor generated by ChatGPT's Dall-E text-to-image model, Dec. 8, 2023, in Boston. The European Union is escalating its scrutiny of the artificial intelligence industry, including taking a fresh look into Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar partnership with OpenAI. The bloc started reviewing the multibillion-dollar deal last year to see whether it broke EU merger rules but dropped it after concluding Microsoft hadn’t gained control of OpenAI. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)
LONDON (AP) — The European Union is escalating its scrutiny of the artificial intelligence industry, including taking a fresh look into Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar partnership with OpenAI, a top EU official said Friday.
The European Commission, the bloc's executive arm, started reviewing the deal last year to see whether it broke EU merger rules but dropped it after concluding Microsoft hadn't gained control of OpenAI, Margrethe Vestager, the commission’s executive vice-president for competition policy, said in a speech.
“Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI over the years,” she said “But we have to make sure that partnerships like this do not become a disguise for one partner getting a controlling influence over the other.”
She signalled that the commission would take another tack to examine the deal, and the industry more broadly. It's using the bloc's antitrust rules, which target abusive behavior by companies that have a dominant market position.
The commission sent information requests in March to big AI players including Microsoft, Google, Facebook and TikTok, reviewed those replies and is “now sending a follow-up request for information on the agreement between Microsoft and OpenAI,” Vestager said.
The EU wants “to understand whether certain exclusivity clauses could have a negative effect on competitors,” she said.
A Microsoft spokesman said, “We appreciate the European Commission’s thorough review and its conclusion that Microsoft’s investment and partnership with OpenAI does not give Microsoft control over the company. We stand ready to respond to any additional questions the European Commission may have.”
OpenAI didn’t respond immediately to a request for comment.
The stepped-up scrutiny highlights how European Union regulators have been pacesetters for the global push to rein in big tech companies, including the major AI players. The EU's led the field with its AI Act, which is set to take effect soon and is the world’s first comprehensive set of regulations for AI.
Vestager said the bloc was also concerned about consumer choices for foundation models, which is the technology that underpins generative AI systems like chatbots.
She said EU regulators have sent information requests “to better understand the effects of Google’s arrangement with Samsung" to pre-install Gemini Nano on some devices from the South Korean tech company. Gemini Nano is the smallest version of Google's Gemini AI foundation model.
"And we have a number of other preliminary antitrust investigations ongoing into various practices in AI-related markets," she added.
The commission is also examining so-called “acqui-hires,” where a company buys another one mainly for its talent, such as Microsoft's hiring of Inflection AI's founder Mustafa Suleyman, and other top staff.
“We will make sure these practices don’t slip through our merger control rules if they basically lead to a concentration,” she said.
Apple has taken down an app that uses crowdsourcing to flag sightings of U.S. immigration agents after coming under pressure from the Trump administration.
Former Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers learned all about technology’s volatile highs and lows as a veteran of the internet’s early boom days during the late 1990s and the ensuing meltdown that followed the mania. And now he is seeing potential signs of the cycle repeating with another transformative technology in artificial intelligence. Chambers is trying take some of the lessons he learned while riding a wave that turned Cisco into the world's most valuable company in 2000 before a crash hammered its stock price and apply them as an investor in AI startups. He recently discussed AI's promise and perils during an interview with The Associated Press.
Tesla reported a surprise increase in sales in the third quarter as the electric car maker likely benefited from a rush by consumers to take advantage of a $7,500 credit before it expired on Sept. 30. The company reported Thursday that sales in the three months through September rose 7% compared to the same period a year ago. The gain follows two quarters of steep declines as people turned off by CEO Elon Musk’s foray into right-wing politics avoided buying his company’s cars and even protested at some dealerships. Sales rose to 497,099 vehicles, compared with 462,890 in the same period last year.
OpenAI could now be the world’s most valuable startup, ahead of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and TikTok parent company ByteDance, after a secondary stock sale designed to retain employees at the ChatGPT maker. Current and former OpenAI employees sold $6.6 billion in shares to a group of investors, pushing the privately held artificial intelligence company’s valuation to $500 billion, according to a source with knowledge of the deal who was not authorized to discuss it publicly. The valuation reflects high expectations for the future of AI technology and continues OpenAI’s remarkable trajectory from its start as a nonprofit research lab in 2015.
Tom’s Guide Editor-in-Chief Mark Spoonauer breaks down Apple & Amazon's latest product drops—what's hot, what's hype, and what really matters for users.
Police in Northern California pulled over a self-driving Waymo taxi after it made an illegal U-turn. But without a driver behind the wheel, they could not issue a moving violation ticket.
With satellites already in orbit, defense contractor L3Harris is standing by to accelerate Trump's executive order. We take an inside look at the technology
Electronic Arts, the video game maker of “Madden NFL,” “The Sims,” and other popular titles, is being acquired and taken private for about $52.5 billion in what could become the largest-ever buyout funded by private-equity firms.
