US antitrust enforcement agencies have decided to investigate Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI over the role they played in the artificial intelligence boom, according to people familiar with the pending litigation.
US antitrust regulators have decided to investigate Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI over the role they played in the artificial intelligence boom, according to people familiar with the upcoming investigation.
The Justice Department will open 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 details of the investigations and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
Nvidia and OpenAI declined to comment Thursday, and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The New York Times first reported the agreement between the two agencies' antitrust regulators on Thursday.
Federal officials, emboldened by President Joe Biden's push for increased scrutiny of big tech companies' business practices, have signaled 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 generate human-like text, images and voice.
FTC Chairman Lina Khan said in January that the agency would scrutinize transactions that “enable a dominant firm to exercise improper influence or gain privileged access in a way that undermines fair competition.”
At the time, the FTC announced it was opening an investigation into major artificial intelligence startups, including OpenAI and Anthropic, and their relationships with cloud computing providers, including Amazon, Google and Microsoft, who are investing billions of dollars in them.
Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI is particularly close, providing the small San Francisco company with the vast computing resources it needs to train generative AI systems like ChatGPT.
The entire AI industry also relies heavily on Nvidia's specialized semiconductors to power AI applications. Demand for the company's AI chips has sent Nvidia's shares soaring, giving it a market capitalization of more than $3 trillion on Wednesday, making it one of the most valuable companies in the S&P 500.
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Associated Press writer Michael Balsamo contributed to this report.
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