The Microsoft logo is displayed on a smartphone.
Mateusz Slodkowski | Sopa Images | Light flare | Getty Images
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has cleared the artificial intelligence partnership between Microsoft and Mistral of any regulatory concerns after previously seeking views on whether the deal qualified as a merger.
The CMA said in a brief statement on Friday that the deal “cannot be investigated under the merger provisions of the Enterprise Act 2002”.
CNBC contacted Microsoft and Mistral.
Mistral, a French AI company founded in 2023, won an investment of 15 million euros, or $16 million, from Microsoft earlier this year.
Under the terms of the deal, the US tech giant receives a minority stake in Mistral, while the French company adds its large language models to the US tech giant’s Azure cloud computing platform.
In April, the CMA began seeking views from interested parties on partnerships entered into by US tech giants with smaller AI companies to determine whether the deals between the companies qualify as mergers.
As part of that effort, the CMA examined minority investment deals entered into by Microsoft and Mistral, as well as whether Microsoft’s hiring of certain former employees of AI startup Inflection constitutes a merger. The watchdog separately invited comment on the deals between Amazon and Anthropic.
Now the regulator says it is no longer studying Microsoft’s investment in Mistral. He gave no updates on his investigations into the Amazon-Inflection deal and Microsoft’s hiring of Inflection employees.
Microsoft had previously denied that its deals with OpenAI and Mistral as well as the hiring of Inflection employees constituted mergers. Amazon also said its partnership with Anthropic represented a limited corporate investment and not a merger.
cnbc
