Proactive Investors - Britain’s competition watchdog has given Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN) the green light to pursue a $4 billion (£3 billion) investment in artificial intelligence research company Anthropic.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened a Phase 1 investigation in August after the partnership was announced in March.
Amazon said the strategic collaboration with Anthropic “will further improve our customers’ experiences”.
Amazon expressed disappointment in the CMA’s decision to hold up to the deal, but the regulator has now determined that “Amazon’s partnership with Anthropic does not qualify for investigation under the merger provisions of the Enterprise Act 2002”.
Detailing the rationale behind the approval, the CMA said the deal was unlikely to significantly reduce competition in the provision of cloud-computing services or AI development tools.
This decision was influenced by the existence of several large, established players in these sectors, indicating that competition would remain strong.
Additionally, the CMA noted that Amazon's investment in Anthropic would not give it control over the firm.
Anthropic’s Claude is a series of large language models (LLMs) designed for natural language processing tasks, similar to OpenAI’s GPT models.