UK’s competition regulator says Microsoft’s OpenAI partnership doesn’t qualify for investigation

Britain’s competition regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), said on Wednesday that Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI doesn’t qualify for an investigation under the merger provisions of the U.K.’s Enterprise Act 2002, the country’s anticompetitive practices law. “Overall, taking into account all of the available evidence […] the CMA does not believe that Microsoft currently controls OpenAI’s commercial policy, and instead exerts a high level of material influence over that policy,” the CMA wrote in its decision. “In other words there is no change of control giving rise to a relevant merger situation.” The CMA began investigating Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI in December 2023. The tech giant is one of the AI company’s top investors, with nearly $14 billion invested since 2019. Microsoft also packages many of OpenAI’s technologies in a managed offering called the Azure OpenAI Service, and it works closely with the outfit to develop products like its Copilot cha ... Read full article.