Google’s partnership with Anthropic formally probed by UK (update)

Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) partnership with artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is being formally probed by the U.K.’s antitrust regulator, the agency said on Thursday.

Shares of the tech giant rose 0.6% in premarket trading.

The Competition and Markets Authority said it is considering whether the partnership between the Sundar Pichai-led Google and Anthropic will impact competition. The CMA said it has set a deadline of December 19 to decide whether to launch into a Phase 2 investigation.

“Google is committed to building the most open and innovative AI ecosystem in the world,” a company spokesperson told Seeking Alpha via email. “Anthropic is free to use multiple cloud providers and does, and we don’t demand exclusive tech rights.”

Google has invested a reported $2B into Anthropic and has deals with the OpenAI competitor to run its models on Google Cloud. Anthropic also has a deal with Google to use its newest artificial intelligence-focused processors, known as TPU v5e.

The CMA first announced in July that the deal between Google and Anthropic was under consideration for investigation. The agency is also looking into Amazon’s (AMZN) deal with Anthropic.

In May, the CMA said a similar deal between Microsoft (MSFT) and French AI startup Mistral AI did not qualify for investigation.

(This story has been updated to include comment from Google.)