The Federal Trade Commission said it would investigate the growing arms race among the biggest technology companies to produce and commercialize artificial intelligence.
The agency said Thursday it had issued orders seeking information about AI investments to Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon.com, Anthropic and Google-owner Alphabet. OpenAI is the developer of ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that was released in November 2022 and now has versions tailored for business applications.
The FTC under Chair Lina Khan has expressed concern about whether dominant technology firms would quickly command the growing field of generative AI, systems that have humanlike abilities to converse, create media, write computer code and more.
The FTC, which shares antitrust authority with the Justice Department, said it would use its study to probe the companies' investments and partnerships and how they affect the competitive landscape for AI. The FTC has a unique authority that allows it to conduct broad studies of competition in different industries, which sometimes take years to produce outcomes.
"Our study will shed light on whether investments and partnerships pursued by dominant companies risk distorting innovation and undermining fair competition," Khan said.
Khan said early last year that companies with big investments in cloud computing could find ways to muscle smaller rivals out of the AI business, since the models generally require huge amounts of data and computing power.
"We need to be very vigilant to make sure that this is not just another site for the big companies becoming bigger and really squelching rivals, " she said in March 2023.
Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI since 2019 in exchange for the right to 49% of future profits. OpenAI says Microsoft holds a "minority economic interest" in an OpenAI for-profit entity.
Some FTC officials were concerned that the agency, which generally has an option to review transactions valued at over $119 million, wasn't told about the investment in advance. Last year, officials began an informal look into whether that transaction model could be used to avoid early antitrust review of AI investments.
Google and Amazon are major investors in Anthropic, a rival of OpenAI that was founded by former OpenAI engineers in 2021.
The FTC's review seeks background on the "strategic rationale" of different AI investments, decisions about new products, governance rights and the companies' own analysis of competition in the AI market.
