The U.K.’s antitrust watchdog today took a first step toward a potential probe into Google LLC’s partnership with Anthropic PBC.

San Francisco-based Anthropic is one of OpenAI’s best-funded competitors with more than $7 billion raised to date. It develops a line of large language models called the Claude series. The company’s newest model, which debuted earlier this month, can outperform OpenAI’s flagship GPT-4o across several task types.

Google LLC became an investor in Anthropic last February through a $300 million investment. The deal reportedly bought the search giant a 10% stake. Google subsequently backed a follow-up $450 million round for Anthropic along with other investors and, more recently, inked a deal to invest up to $2 billion in the startup.

The U.K.’s antitrust regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority, today asked interested parties to provide feedback about the Google-Anthropic partnership. CMA officials are seeking to determine whether the deal could hurt market competition in the U.K. Interested parties have until Aug. 13 to submit arguments.

As part of the inquiry, the CMA will examine whether Google’s partnership with Anthropic constitutes a “relevant merger situation.” This is a regulatory term that covers deals in which two companies cease to be distinct or are nearing such an outcome.

Requests for feedback from the CMA can lead to a so-called Phase 1 antitrust investigation. Such a probe can end with a decision in favor of the company being scrutinized or a more detailed Phase 2 probe that usually takes several months. At the end of the latter investigation, the CMA may order the company to change any business practices that were found to be in breach of antitrust rules. 

The watchdog is launching its inquiry a few days after Anthropic debuted its newest and most advanced LLM, Claude 3.5 Sonnet. The model outperformed GPT-4o across six of the eight task collections that the company tested in an internal comparison. According to Anthropic, Claude 3.5 Sonnet can also generate responses about twice as fast as its previous flagship LLM.

Ahead of the model’s release, the company submitted it to the U.K.’s Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute. That’s a newly launched government organization tasked with studying the potential risks posed by new AI systems.

Anthropic told TechCrunch that “we intend to cooperate with the CMA and provide them with the complete picture about Google’s investment and our commercial collaboration. We are an independent company and none of our strategic partnerships or investor relationships diminish the independence of our corporate governance or our freedom to partner with others.”

Google, for its part, said in a statement that “Anthropic is free to use multiple cloud providers and does, and we don’t demand exclusive tech rights.”

Anthropic has also raised $4 billion from Google rival Amazon.com Inc. through an investment that closed in March. At the time of the deal’s announcement, the LLM developer stated that it would use Amazon Web Services Inc. infrastructure to train its new models. That partnership likewise caught the attention of the CMA, which in April asked interested parties to provide input about the deal.

The watchdog previously requested feedback about Microsoft Corp.’s investment in OpenAI. The European Commission, meanwhile, has signaled that it may launch an antitrust probe into the companies’ partnership. The commission recently sent Microsoft a set of questions about “certain exclusivity clauses” in the partnership agreement that officials believe may have breached antitrust rules. 

Photo: Google