Updated UK antitrust regulators today announced the start of a merger investigation into Microsoft's cash deal with startup Inflection AI, which included employee poaching.
UK Antitrust Watchdog investigates Microsoft-Inflection AI deal – what it means for competition
The Competition and Markets Authority's (CMA) concerns stem from the hiring of Inflection AI co-founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan, along with "several members" of the Inflection team, who left Microsoft in March.
Suleyman, who has been accused of mistreating subordinates in previous positions, now serves as CEO of Microsoft's AI division, while Simonyan is the group's chief scientist. Those hires, and a $650m (£502m) deal that gave Microsoft access to Inflection's models, have the CMA wondering if competition could be reduced on the islands as a result.
British officials have been inspecting the matter since April, when the CMA said it wanted third-party input on whether the Microsoft/Inflection AI deal, and Amazon's $4 billion investment in Anthropic, fell within UK merger guidelines despite not being formal mergers.
