Microsoft-MistralAI cooperation exempt from UK antitrust investigation

TapTechNews May 17th - The cooperation case between Microsoft and the artificial intelligence company MistralAI will be exempt from the UK antitrust investigation. The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) released a statement on May 17th, stating that it ruled that the partnership between Microsoft and MistralAI does not meet the investigation qualifications under the merger clause of the UK Enterprise Act 2002.

At the end of February, Microsoft announced the establishment of a new partnership with the European version of OpenAI, the French artificial intelligence start-up MistralAI. Microsoft said in a statement that it will invest 2 billion euros (TapTechNews note: currently about 15.7 billion Chinese yuan) to help MistralAI open up new business opportunities and expand to the global market.

According to the agreement, MistralAI's large language model (LLM) will be provided on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform, becoming the second company to host an LLM on this platform after OpenAI. Microsoft will also help MistralAI acquire new customers, and the latter will launch its ChatGOT-style multilingual chat assistant LeChat.

The CMA said that Microsoft has not obtained the ability to substantially affect MistralAI's business policies, so it decided to close the case. Last month, the UK regulator announced that it was collecting information about the cooperation to assess whether it would threaten the UK's competitive environment. At the same time, they also launched a preliminary investigation into Microsoft's cooperation case with InflectionAI and Amazon's investment case with Anthropic.

The cooperation case between Microsoft and OpenAI is also in the preliminary investigation stage of the CMA. However, since this cooperation case does not meet the definition standard of acquisition, it is expected to avoid the EU's antitrust review.