Jodi Godoy
NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. antitrust regulators are examining the role of big technology companies in the artificial intelligence (AI) boom, examining whether the business practices of established players are stifling competition in the growing field.
The US Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have decided to break up the industry’s biggest players, bringing Nvidia (NASDAQ:), OpenAI and Microsoft (NASDAQ:) closer to potential investigations.
Here are some AI issues that regulators are concerned about:
DATA
Speaking at an event at the University of Chicago in April, Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter expressed a “sense of urgency” to address the advantage that large companies have in accessing the data used to train artificial intelligence models.
“To the extent that data is aggregated or in the hands of a few, it can become the high point of competition as barriers to entry to scale and access to these key ingredients are limited to a small number of players,” he said.
WORKERS
Another concern is the impact that generative AI could have on the creative people whose work it could replicate, as well as on the engineers creating the technology.
“Without competition to reward creators for their work, artificial intelligence companies can harness the power of monopsony at levels we’ve never seen before,” Kanter said at a Stanford University artificial intelligence conference hosted by the Justice Department in late May. , using a term that often refers to the dominance of labor markets by one or a few employers.
The Federal Trade Commission, which recently moved to ban noncompete agreements, last year flagged potential concerns that employers using AI were stifling competition by preventing qualified workers from moving to competing companies.
PARTNERSHIPS
In January, the Federal Trade Commission launched a wide-ranging investigation into artificial intelligence companies and cloud service providers, ordering OpenAI, Microsoft, Alphabet (NASDAQ:), Amazon (NASDAQ:) and Anthropic to provide information about recent investments and partnerships.
“We are examining whether these connections allow dominant firms to exert undue influence or gain privileged access in ways that could undermine fair competition at all levels of the artificial intelligence stack,” FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan said at the time.
The regulator is also seeking to understand how partnerships with large technology companies influence strategy and “decisions regarding pricing of products and services; decisions to provide access to products and services; and personnel decisions.”
Khan told a conference at the University of Chicago that one goal of scrutinizing partnerships is to “ensure that they are not a way to circumvent merger review.”