US to Launch Antitrust Investigation Against Microsoft, OpenAI and NVIDIA in AI Field
TapTechNews June 6, it is reported that according to The New York Times, the US federal regulatory agency has reached an agreement to launch an antitrust investigation against the dominant positions of Microsoft, OpenAI and NVIDIA in the field of artificial intelligence. This is the latest sign that the US government is strengthening the supervision of artificial intelligence technology.
It is reported that, according to two informed sources, the US Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reached this agreement in the past week and it is expected to be completed in the next few days. According to the agreement, the Department of Justice will take the lead in investigating whether the behavior of NVIDIA (the world's largest artificial intelligence chip manufacturer) violates antitrust laws. The FTC will focus on examining the pioneer of generative artificial intelligence, OpenAI (famous for its chatbot ChatGPT), and Microsoft (Microsoft has invested 13 billion US dollars in OpenAI) which has in-depth cooperation with it.
This agreement marks that the US government's review of artificial intelligence is escalating. Artificial intelligence is a rapidly developing technology that has the potential to disrupt employment, information and even people's lifestyles. The Biden administration has been committed to controlling the power of large technology companies, and the Department of Justice and the FTC are the two institutions at the forefront of governance. In 2019, after the two sides reached a similar agreement, they launched investigations on Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta, and sued these companies for alleged monopoly behavior.
For several months, NVIDIA, Microsoft and OpenAI have not been the key focus of the Biden government's regulation. However, with the strong rise of generative artificial intelligence at the end of 2022, which can generate realistic texts, images, videos and audios and create a sensation in the industry, the situation begins to change.
TapTechNews noted that US regulatory agencies have recently expressed the hope of taking the lead in regulating the development of artificial intelligence. In July this year, the FTC launched an investigation to determine whether OpenAI has damaged the interests of consumers in the process of data collection. In January, the FTC also launched a broad investigation into the strategic cooperation between technology giants and artificial intelligence start-ups, including Microsoft's investment in OpenAI, and Google's and Amazon's investments in another young artificial intelligence company, Anthropic.
However, the US is still lagging behind Europe in the field of artificial intelligence regulation. Last year, EU officials reached a landmark artificial intelligence regulatory rule on this rapidly developing technology, focusing on the most risky use mode of artificial intelligence. Last month, a group of senators in Washington released legislative proposals on artificial intelligence, calling for an annual appropriation of 32 billion US dollars to promote the US's leading position in this technology field, but did not require the formulation of specific new regulations.
Informed sources said that the discussions between the FTC and the Department of Justice about artificial intelligence companies entered the final stage last week, and the senior leaders of both sides were involved. FTC Chairperson Lina Khan said in an interview in February that in the field of artificial intelligence, the agency is trying to discover problems at the budding stage, instead of waiting until the probl ems are deeply rooted and difficult to correct.
As of the time of TapTechNews's dispatch, spokespersons of the FTC and the Department of Justice both refused to comment. NVIDIA, Microsoft and OpenAI also did not respond to requests for comment immediately.
As one of the biggest winners in the artificial intelligence boom, NVIDIA, OpenAI and Microsoft have been in the spotlight and have also raised concerns about their dominant positions. Silicon Valley chip manufacturer NVIDIA is a major supplier of graphics processing units (GPUs), which are components dedicated to artificial intelligence tasks such as machine learning. With the rise of artificial intelligence, technology companies scrambled to buy NVIDIA's GPUs, doubling or even tripling their sales. NVIDIA's stock price has soared by more than 200% in the past year, and the company's market value exceeded 3 trillion US dollars for the first time on Wednesday, surpassing Apple.