The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission have reportedly reached an agreement that will allow them to launch antitrust probes into Nvidia Corp., Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI.

The New York Times reported the development today, citing people familiar with the matter. The agreement is expected to be finalized in the coming days. Separately, the Wall Street Journal cited sources as saying that the FTC officials are scrutinizing a software licensing deal that Microsoft recently signed with Inflection AI Inc., an OpenAI competitor.

The FTC and the Justice Department are both tasked with antitrust enforcement tasks. According to Politico, the agencies must consequently receive approval from one another before launching a probe into potential competition law violations. The agreement that the FTC and Justice reportedly reached about the potential probes into Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI is said to be the fruit of a nearly year-long negotiation process.

Sources told the Times that the Justice Department will carry out the investigation into Nvidia. Industry players have reportedly “grown worried” about the company’s leading position in the market for artificial intelligence processors. Those concerns reportedly focus on the software that Nvidia Corp. ships with its chips, as well as the way it distributes those chips to customers.

The investigation into Microsoft and OpenAI is expected to be led by the FTC. According to Politico, the probe will seek to determine whether the two companies have “unfair advantages” in the large language model market. Microsoft has reportedly provided OpenAI with $13 billion worth of capital and cloud infrastructure in return for a 49% stake.

OpenAI faces competition from several heavily-funded LLM startups, including Inflection AI. In March, Microsoft appointed Inflection AI co-founder and Chief Executive Mustafa Suleyman to lead its consumer AI group. Microsoft also hired most of the company’s other employees as part of the deal, which reportedly cost it about $650 million.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that the FTC has opened a probe into the transaction. According to the paper’s sources, the agency sent Microsoft and Inflection AI subpoenas asking for information about their partnership. FTC officials are reportedly looking to determine whether the companies structured the deal in a manner designed to avoid regulatory scrutiny.

The FTC previously sued Amazon.com Inc. over the interface design of its Prime subscription service. Justice, meanwhile, is pursuing an antitrust case against Google LLC over its practices in the search and search advertising markets.

Politico reported that “AI-related investigations” into both companies were held up prior to the agreement that the agencies reached today. Under the agreement, the FTC will continue leading the antitrust probe into Amazon, while Justice will be responsible for the probe focused on Google’s search business.

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