Google-Anthropic Partnership Gets UK Antitrust Regulator Approval

The UK’s competition watchdog has cleared Google’s partnership with Anthropic.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said Tuesday (Nov. 19) that it had determined that the deal between the tech giant and the artificial intelligence (AI) startup did not warrant additional investigation.

“The CMA does not believe that Google has acquired material influence over Anthropic as a result of the partnership,” the regulator said in its assessment of the arrangement, which came after a review of “a significant volume” of company documents.

As reported here, the CMA announced the launch of the investigation last month. It stems from Google’s financial backing of Anthropic, which includes a $500 million investment last year and an additional commitment of $1.5 billion.

Google had said that Anthropic is free to use multiple cloud providers for its work, and that the company does not demand exclusive tech rights.

In a related case, the CMA announced in September that it would not pursue its investigation into whether Amazon’s partnership with Anthropic could harm competition, after determining that the arrangement did not meet the “turnover” or share of supply test for merger situations.

“In particular, the CMA found that Anthropic’s U.K. turnover does not exceed 70 million pounds in the U.K., nor do the parties, on the basis of the available evidence, together account for a 25% or more share of supply of any description of goods or services in the U.K.,” the authority said. “The CMA does not therefore believe that it is or may be the case that a relevant merger situation has been created.”

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote earlier this month about Anthropic’s latest AI model, which costs four times more than before but outperforms its earlier top model.

The Claude 3.5 Haiku charges $1 to process a million tokens of input and $5 to generate a million tokens of output. Experts say the rising costs of high-performance AI models can present significant challenges for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

“Developing custom AI solutions can be expensive, with costs ranging from $20,000 to over $500,000, depending on complexity,” Niv Hertz, director of AI at Aporia, told PYMNTS. “This financial barrier may limit SMBs’ ability to adopt advanced AI technologies, potentially widening the competitive gap between them and larger enterprises.”