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The UK’s antitrust regulator will formally investigate Alphabet’s $2.3 billion Anthropic investment


The UK’s competition regulator is investigating whether Alphabet’s $2.3 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic harms UK competition. The CMA will open its preliminary probe on Friday.

After opening public comments this summer, the Competition and Market Authority (CMA) said on Thursday it has “sufficient information” to begin an initial investigation into whether Alphabet’s reported $2.3 billion investment in the Claude AI chatbot maker harms competition in UK markets. Situations like this can be classified as a “quasi-merger,” where deep-pocketed tech companies essentially take control of emerging startups through strategic investments and hiring founders and technical workers. Of course, Google’s Gemini competes with Claude, and both companies make large language models they provide to small businesses and enterprise customers.

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