Microsoft Faces UK Competition Investigation Over AI Startup Hiring
By Kelvin Chan
FILE - Mustafa Suleyman co founder and CEO of Inflection AI speaks to journalist during the AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes, England, on Nov. 1, 2023. The Competition and Markets Authority said Tuesday, July 16, 2024 that its review of the hirings from Inflection AI turned up “sufficient information” to open an investigation. Microsoft hired Inflection's co-founder and CEO Mustafa Suleyman to head up its consumer artificial intelligence business, along with several top engineers and researchers. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
LONDON (AP) — British regulators opened a preliminary investigation on Tuesday into Microsoft’s hiring of an AI startup’s key staff over concerns that it could thwart competition in the booming artificial intelligence market.
The Competition and Markets Authority said its review of the hirings from Inflection AI, including its co-founder and CEO Mustafa Suleyman, turned up “sufficient information” to open an investigation.
Microsoft hired Suleyman to head up its consumer artificial intelligence business earlier this year, and brought over several top engineers and researchers. Suleyman co-founded the AI research lab DeepMind, which is now owned by Google, before setting up Inflection and is considered an influential figure in the AI world.
The watchdog has indicated that it was assessing whether the hirings amount to a merger that results in “a substantial lessening of competition” in the U.K.'s AI market, in breach of the country's antitrust rules.
“We are confident that the hiring of talent promotes competition and should not be treated as a merger," Microsoft said in a statement. "We will provide the UK Competition and Markets Authority with the information it needs to complete its inquiries expeditiously.”
The British watchdog has until Sept. 11 to decide whether to give its approval or escalate the probe into an in-depth investigation. The authority has the power to reverse deals or impose fixes to address competition concerns.
Authorities on both sides of the Atlantic have become concerned about how the biggest technology companies are gobbling up the talent and products of innovative AI startups without formally acquiring them.
Three members of the U.S. Senate wrote last week to antitrust enforcers at the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, urging them to investigate Amazon's deal with San Francisco-based Adept. The deal will result in Adept's CEO and key employees going to Amazon and giving the e-commerce giant a license to Adept’s AI systems and datasets.
The senators noted that the FTC is already looking into the Microsoft-Inflection deal and described it as “alarmingly similar to the one between Amazon and Adept, and it effectively eliminated a major competitor to OpenAI.”
Skype users are scrambling to find an alternative after Microsoft shut down the pioneering internet phone service which let people make cheap long distance calls and chat with other users. Google Voice lets users make calls from a smartphone or a desktop web browser but it's only available to people in the U.S. Viber users can call phone numbers but can't get a number to receive calls. Zoom offers phone options too. You could get a number from a low cost virtual carrier or try other internet phone services. Microsoft says some Skype features will migrate to Teams, but its Teams Phone feature is only for businesses.
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Apple CEO Tim Cook said Thursday that the majority of iPhones sold in the U.S. in the current fiscal quarter will be sourced from India, while iPads and other devices will come from Vietnam as the company works to avoid the impact of President Trump’s tariffs on its business. Apple’s earnings for the first three months of the year topped Wall Street’s expectations thanks to high demand for its iPhones, and the company said tariffs had a limited effect on the fiscal second quarter’s results. Cook added that for the current quarter, assuming things don’t change, Apple expects to see $900 million added to its costs as a result of the tariffs.
Visa is hoping to hand your credit card to an artificial intelligence “agent” that can find and buy clothes, groceries, airplane tickets and other items on your behalf.
Shares of Deliveroo, the food delivery service based in London, are hitting three-year highs on Monday after it received a $3.6 billion proposed takeover offer from DoorDash.
