US, Antitrust: 'Urgent scrutiny of how Big Tech manages Ai'. Microsoft in the crosshairs

The top US antitrust official will "urgently" examine the artificial intelligence sector, following concerns that power over this transformative technology is being concentrated among a few very wealthy players. Jonathan Kanter said in an interview with the Financial Times that he is examining "monopoly choke points and the competitive landscape" of Ai, which includes everything from the computing power and data used to train large language models, to cloud service providers, engineering talent and access to essential hardware such as graphics processing unit chips.

Regulators are concerned that the nascent Ai industry is "at the upper limit of competition, not the lower limit" and must act "urgently" to ensure that already dominant technology companies do not control the market, Kanter said.

"Sometimes the most significant intervention is in real time," he added. "The beauty is that you can be less invasive." Kanter, now in his third year at the Justice Department, has spearheaded, along with the Federal Trade Commission, a tougher antitrust approach, suing tech giants such as Google and Apple for what the US government claims are unfair monopolies in services such as app stores, search engines and digital advertising.

Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether Microsoft structured one of its latest deals with an artificial intelligence start-up to avoid a government antitrust review of the transaction.

In March, Microsoft hired the co-founder of Inflection AI and almost all of its employees and agreed to pay the start-up about $650 million as part of a licence fee to resell its technology. Inflection's investors were told they would be repaid over time from the proceeds of sales.