The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) in Britain has announced that it will investigate recent AI acquisitions by Microsoft and Amazon. The review was prompted due to concerns over the potential disruption of competition in the AI industry.

The investigation will examine Microsoft's alliance with the open-source developer of foundation models, Mistral AI, and its recruitment of key personnel from Inflection AI, the developer of chatbot Pi. 

Amazon's USD 4 billion investment in AI startup Anthropic is also under scrutiny. This decision depends on inputs from "interested third parties," which will determine if the review will escalate to a full-fledged antitrust investigation.

Analyst QuickTake: This month, EU antitrust regulators also looked into Microsoft's USD 13 billion investment in OpenAI and concluded that it is not an acquisition and does not require a formal investigation. Moreover, earlier this year, the European Commission initiated a competition investigation into Microsoft's multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI . Microsoft's partnership with Mistral AI was also under scrutiny from the EU in February and Italy's Data Protection Authority issued a warning to OpenAI that its chatbot ChatGPT was supposedly breaching data protection rules in January.