Proactive Investors - A major US antitrust investigation is brewing into the dominant role that Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) and OpenAI are playing in the emerging artificial intelligence industry.
The US Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission have agreed to split responsibility for investigating this trio, the New York Times reports.
They are keen to scrutinise potential antitrust violations in the AI industry, with the Justice Department focusing on Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) and the FTC examining Microsoft and OpenAI.
The investigations are part of a broader effort to address concerns about monopolies in AI.
Jonathan Kanter, the Department of Justice chief, told the Financial Times there was the need for "urgent scrutiny" over big tech's control of AI, noting that regulators must act "with urgency" to prevent dominant companies from monopolising the market.
He added that a "real-time" intervention might be less invasive for industries.
Kanter also mentioned that the investigation would cover various aspects, including computing power, data used for training large language models, cloud service providers, engineering talent, and essential hardware like graphics processing unit chips.
Earlier this year, the FTC demanded information from OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Anthropic about recent investments and partnerships involving generative AI companies and cloud service providers.