technology
Nvidia, OpenAI and Microsoft approaching potential investigation.
NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. antitrust regulators are investigating big technology companies' role in the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, probing whether incumbents' business practices are stifling competition in the fast-growing sector.
The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) are moving to break up some of the industry's largest companies, opening up the door to potential investigations of Nvidia, OpenAI and Microsoft.
Some of the AI issues that concern regulators include:
data
At an event at the University of Chicago in April, Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Cantor expressed a “sense of urgency” to address the advantages that large companies have in access to the data used to train AI models.
“To the extent that data is aggregated or in the hands of a few people, it could become the highest level of competition because the barriers to scale and access to these key ingredients limit it to a few players,” he said.
Worker
Another concern is the impact generative AI will have on not only the engineers who build the technology, but also the creative people whose work it enables to be replicated.
“Without competition to pay the creators of their work, AI companies could abuse their monopoly buying power in ways we've never seen before,” Cantor said in late May at a Stanford University AI conference co-hosted by the Justice Department. Monopoly buying power is a term that often refers to the domination of a labor market by one or a small number of employers.
The FTC, which recently moved to ban non-compete agreements, expressed concern last year that AI employers could stifle competition by preventing skilled workers from leaving for rival companies.
partnership
In January, the FTC launched a broad investigation into AI companies and cloud service providers, ordering OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet (GOOGLE), Amazon, and Anthropic to provide information about their recent investments and partnerships.
“We are examining whether these relationships allow dominant companies to exert improper influence or gain privileged access in a way that undermines fair competition across layers of the AI stack,” FTC Chairman Lina Khan said at the time.
Regulators are also seeking to understand how partnerships with Big Techs affect their strategies and “decisions about pricing products and services, decisions about granting access to products and services, and personnel decisions.”
One goal of scrutinizing partnerships is to “make sure they're not a way to avoid merger review,” Kahn said at the University of Chicago conference.
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