The Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department are set to open antitrust investigations into Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia, examining the powerful companies’ influence on the artificial intelligence industry, a source familiar confirmed to CNBC.
The FTC will take the lead on looking into Microsoft and OpenAI, while the DOJ will focus on Nvidia, and the investigations will focus on the companies’ conduct, rather than mergers and acquisitions, according to the source.
As startups like OpenAI and Anthropic — the companies behind the ChatGPT and Claude chatbots, respectively — gain steam in the generative AI market, tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta have been part of an AI arms race of sorts, racing to integrate the technology to ensure they don’t fall behind in a market that’s predicted to top $1 trillion in revenue within a decade.
Microsoft, for instance, first invested $1 billion into OpenAI in 2019. The size of its investment has since swelled to about $13 billion. Microsoft heavily uses OpenAI’s model for its Copilot chatbot and offers open-source models on its Azure cloud.
The hefty investments are necessary because AI models are notoriously expensive to build and train, requiring thousands of specialized chips that, to date, have largely come from Nvidia. Meta, which is developing its own model called Llama, has said it’s spending billions on Nvidia’s graphics processing units, one of the many companies that’s helped the chipmaker bolster year-over-year revenue by more than 250%.
News of the coming antitrust investigation comes days after a group of current and former OpenAI employees published an open letter Tuesday, describing concerns about the AI industry’s rapid advancement despite a lack of oversight and an absence of whistleblower protections for those who wish to speak up.