The European competition watchdog will examine Microsoft’s investment in the pioneer of generative artificial intelligence, OpenAI, a sign of growing concern about the domination of this crucial market by a handful of American giants.
The European Commission is “verifying whether Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI”, the creator of ChatGPT, “can be subject to review under the EU Merger Regulation”, it said on Tuesday .
The software giant invested around $13 billion in the Californian start-up founded in 2015. Microsoft announced at the end of November that a representative of the group would join the OpenAI board of directors as an observer.
Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager is expected in California on Thursday and Friday where she is due to participate in a conference on antitrust in the technology sector in Palo Alto and meet several big bosses.
She will meet notably with the leaders of Apple, Tim Cook, and Google, Sundar Pichai, as well as with two heads of OpenAI: the director of technology, Mira Murati, and the director of strategy, Jason Kwon .
Brussels is “examining some of the agreements that have been concluded between major players in the digital market and developers of generative artificial intelligence (AI)” and in particular “studying the impact of these partnerships on market dynamics”, according to the press release of the Commission.
Exponential growth
Generative AI makes it possible to create texts, photos, sounds or videos in just a few seconds, in response to a user request, for a wide range of uses.
Technology, whose growth is expected to be exponential, will revolutionize the work of certain professions, with an increase in productivity and an expected big impact on the competitiveness of companies.
Venture capital investments in AI within the EU are estimated at more than €7.2 billion in 2023. Europe hopes to have future champions like Aleph Alpha in Germany and Mistral AI in France.
But, given the gigantic financial resources deployed to develop them, competition authorities are concerned about the risk of capture of these innovations by a small number of digital giants such as Microsoft, but also Alphabet, Meta or even the Chinese Baidu.
The European Union agreed at the beginning of December on unprecedented regulation of AI at the global level. It must make it possible to avoid certain excesses while promoting the growth of the market.
The EU has also adopted a digital markets regulation (DMA) which will apply at the beginning of March to better fight against the anti-competitive practices of the giants of the sector.
“Reasons to be concerned”
“Artificial intelligence has the potential to become the museum of antitrust horrors if we do nothing,” Benoit Coeuré, president of the French Competition Authority, declared at the end of November during a round table in Paris.
“There are reasons to be concerned. We risk seeing in this area the entire catalog of anticompetitive practices […] that is to say, tying, bundling, barriers to accessing data, conglomerate effects and self-preference,” he explained.
The British competition watchdog (CMA) also announced at the beginning of December that it was examining the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI.
The CMA therefore launched a call for comments “from interested parties and third parties”.
The European Commission initiated a similar approach, announcing on Tuesday that it was launching “two calls for contributions on competition”, one concerning “generative artificial intelligence” and the other “virtual worlds”.
Virtual worlds are immersive environments, based on 3D and extended reality technologies, used in particular for design or simulation tasks.
The Commission specifies that it has sent “requests for information to several major digital players”. She says she wants to gather opinions “on how competition law can help ensure that these new markets remain competitive.”
At the end of this examination, the Commission announces that it could organize “a workshop” during the second quarter of 2024 “in order to bring together the different perspectives emerging from the contributions and continue this reflection”.