Approved by UK Competition and Markets Authority microsoft’s The artificial intelligence partnership with Mistral has cleared regulatory concerns after previously seeking comment on whether the deal qualifies as a merger.
The CMA said in a brief update on Friday that the transaction “is not subject to investigation under the merger provisions of the Enterprise Act 2002”.
A CMA spokesperson said the regulator has determined, based on evidence provided by Microsoft and Mistral and additional industry feedback, that it does not believe Microsoft has “significant influence” over Mistral. said.
“Investments and partnerships are essential for new entrants to the AI economy,” a Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC in an emailed statement. “We welcome the CMA’s decision that our spin-off investment and partnership with Mistral AI do not constitute a merger or acquisition.”
Mistral did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
Mistral, a French AI company founded in 2023, secured a 15 million euro ($16 million) investment from Microsoft earlier this year.
Under the terms of the deal, the US tech giant will take a minority stake in Mistral, while the French company will add its large language model to the US tech giant’s Azure cloud computing platform.
The CMA is consulting stakeholders on the partnership agreed between the US tech giant and a small-to-medium-sized AI company to determine whether the deal between the two companies constitutes a merger.
As part of this effort, the CMA will examine whether the minority investment deal agreed to by Microsoft and ChatGPT makers OpenAI and Mistral, as well as Microsoft’s hiring of some former employees from AI startup Inflection, constitutes a merger. investigated.
The watchdog separately requested comment on the arrangements between the two sides. Amazon and AI company Anthropic.
Now, regulators say they are no longer considering Microsoft’s investment in Mistral.
No updates have been released regarding investigations into Amazon’s deal with Inflection, Microsoft’s deal with OpenAI, and the hiring of former Inflection employees.
Microsoft previously denied that its contracts with OpenAI and Mistral and the hiring of employees from Inflection amounted to a merger.
Amazon also said its partnership with Anthropic represents a limited corporate investment rather than a merger.
Alex Hafner, a competitive partner at Floodgate, said the fact that the CMA had only confirmed the Mistral investigation’s conclusions meant that “the CMA’s ongoing investigation into the other two deals and Microsoft’s role in the OpenAI project… It remains unresolved.”
“It is clear that competition authorities continue to be very closely involved in developments in the field of AI, and we can expect some further announcements from the CMA in the near future on the results of the ongoing work streams in this area.” said Hafner. Email.