Amazon‘s multibillion-dollar investment in the US AI company Anthropic will be investigated by the UK’s antitrust watchdog.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced on Thursday (8 August) that it had entered a “Phase 1” investigation into Amazon’s investment into Anthropic.

The investigation will study whether the investment and partnership could hurt competition in the country.

An initial probe into the partnership has provided the CMA with “sufficient information” to start a formal investigation, according to the watchdog.

The first phase of the investigation provides the CMA with 40 days to decide whether the investment could harm competition.

If enough evidence is found, the CMA will be able to investigate further in a more in-depth “Phase 2” investigation.

Anthropic, a leading GenAI start-up based in San Francisco, released its ChatGPT rival chatbot Claude in March 2023.

Following an initial $1.24bn investment in September, the two companies confirmed that Amazon would invest $4bn in total.

Anthropic confirmed it was using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider for mission-critical workloads, future foundation model development, and safety research. 

Anthropic has raised around $7.4bn over the past year. 

“GenAI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of data and AI at AWS cloud provider.