Britain’s competitors authority, the Competitors and Markets Authority (CMA), said Wednesday that Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI doesn’t qualify for investigation beneath the merger provisions of the U.Ok.’s Enterprise Act 2002, the nation’s anticompetitive practices legislation.
“General, taking into consideration the entire out there proof […] the CMA doesn’t consider that Microsoft at present controls OpenAI’s business coverage, and as a substitute exerts a excessive stage of fabric affect over that coverage,” the CMA wrote in its decision. “In different phrases there is no such thing as a change of management giving rise to a related merger state of affairs.”
The CMA started investigating Microsoft’s partnership in December 2023. The tech large is a prime investor in OpenAI, having poured nearly $14 billion into the AI startup. Microsoft additionally packages lots of OpenAI’s applied sciences in a managed providing referred to as the Azure OpenAI Service, and it really works intently with OpenAI to develop merchandise like Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot and GitHub Copilot AI coding assistant.