The big tech firms want an AI monopoly – but the UK watchdog can bring them to heel | John Naughton

Microsoft, Meta and Google are snapping up small players in the burgeoning industry - but the Competition and Markets Authority is demanding fair play

Monopoly," said Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley's answer to Darth Vader, is the condition of every successful business." This aspiration is widely shared by Gamman, the new acronynm for the Valley's giants - Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Nvidia. And the arrival of AI has sharpened the appetite of each for attaining that blessed state before the others get there.

One symptom of their anxiety is the way they have been throwing unconscionable amounts of money at the 70-odd generative AI startups that have mushroomed since it became clear that AI was going to be the new new thing. Microsoft reportedly put $13bn (about 10.4bn) into OpenAI, for example, but it was also the lead investor in a $1.3bn funding round for Inflection, Deepmind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman's startup. Amazon put $4bn into Anthropic, the startup founded by refugees from OpenAI. Google invested $500m in the same outfit, with a promise of $1.5bn more, and unspecified sums in A121 Labs and Hugging Face. (Yeah, I know the names make no sense.) Microsoft has also invested in Mistral, the French AI startup. And so on. In 2023, of the $27bn that was invested in AI startups, only $9bn came from venture capitalist firms - which until recently had been by far the biggest funders of new tech enterprises in Silicon Valley.