The Federal Trade Commission is launching an inquiry into massive investments made by Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet into generative AI startups OpenAI and...
Anthropic, the agency announced on Thursday. The FTC said that it had issued "compulsory orders" to the companies and would scrutinize their relationships with AI startups to understand their impact on competition. "History shows that new technologies can create new markets and healthy competition," FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement. "As companies race to develop and monetize AI, we must guard against tactics that foreclose this opportunity. Our study will shed light on whether investments and partnerships pursued by dominant companies risk distorting innovation and undermining fair competition." The companies have 45 days to respond to the agency. Ever since OpenAI released ChatGPT at the end of 2022, generative AI has exploded, sparking both excitement about its potential to increase productivity as well as anxiety about job losses. Against this backdrop, the world's largest tech companies have been racing to develop their own versions of the tech as well as pouring billions of dollars into smaller startups creating it. Microsoft, for instance, invested more than $13 billion…