EU to scrutinize Microsoft and Google AI deals for antitrust issues, says Vestager

Microsoft’s partnership with artificial intelligence pioneer OpenAI and Google’s move to install its AI service on Samsung phones are both getting European Union antitrust scrutiny, the bloc’s competition chief said.

Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition commissioner, said officials had concluded that they couldn’t review Microsoft’s $13 billion in investments in OpenAI under merger rules but would send the companies follow-up questions under antitrust rules "to understand whether certain exclusivity clauses could have a negative effect on competitors."

The EU executive also wants "to better understand the effects of Google’s arrangement with Samsung to pre-install its small model ’Gemini nano’ on certain Samsung devices," she said. "The risk we see is that big tech companies could make it difficult for smaller foundation model developers to reach end users."

Vestager warned that artificial intelligence is "developing at breakneck speed." She said they have "a number of other preliminary antitrust investigations ongoing into various practices in AI-related markets," without giving any details.

"We cannot just sit back and see how things pan out," she said. "Now is the time to act. Strong competition enforcement is always needed at times of big industrial and tech changes."

"It is already clear that we need to be on our guard. Over market concentration, anti-competitive behaviour, and new types of partnerships," she said.

The Commission is worried about how Big Tech firms could use their power to build AI tools and roll them out across their ecosystems. The large foundation models behind AI services "need vast amounts of data, computing power, cloud infrastructure, and talent, which only a few players have," Vestager said.

She also said that officials were watching "acqui-hires" where a company takes over another to scoop up talented workers, citing Microsoft and AI developer Inflection.

"We will make sure these practices don’t slip through our merger control rules," she said.

"The commercialisation of AI and its powerful tools is going to be lead by a few companies that already have a lot of market power," she said. "So we remain vigilant."

A Microsoft spokesperson said the company stands "ready to respond to any additional questions the European Commission may have."