Microsoft's Hiring of InflectionAI Employees Under Scrutiny by UK Regulator

TapTechNews July 16th news, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) released a statement on July 16th stating that it is investigating Microsoft's hiring of some former employees of InflectionAI and the related arrangements reached with the Inflection side. The regulator is concerned that this move may lead to a'substantially reduced competition'.

The CMA stated in the statement that the deadline for making the first-stage decision is September 11th, and at that time the agency will announce whether to transfer this case to the in-depth investigation of the second stage.

In April this year, the CMA had said that it was soliciting public opinions to conduct an investigation into a series of transactions between tech giants and AI start-ups, including the transaction between Microsoft and InflectionAI, the transaction between Microsoft and MistralAI, and the transaction between Amazon and Anthropic. It is reported that MistralAI recently raised 643 million US dollars and has a valuation of 6 billion US dollars.

In March, Microsoft announced the hiring of InflectionAI's co-founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan, among which Suleyman will be responsible for leading Microsoft's consumer AI department. In addition, Microsoft also recruited most of InflectionAI's employees and said it will pay about 650 million US dollars in licensing fees to obtain its technology.

As part of the management change, Suleyman is currently leading a team at Microsoft focused on Copilot, Bing, and Edge.

According to reports in June, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is also investigating whether the transaction between Microsoft and InflectionAI was deliberately designed to avoid government review.

TapTechNews noted that Microsoft has invested in many AI start-ups in recent years, including investing billions of dollars in the creator of the chatbot ChatGPT, OpenAI.