Anthropic says US Google search proposal will hurt AI investment

ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) developer Anthropic asked a federal court to nix a US government proposal that would block Alphabet’s Google from investing in AI startups to remedy its illegal monopolisation of the online search market.

“A remedy that requires Google to terminate its relationship with Anthropic would harm both Anthropic and competition more generally,” the AI startup said in a court filing on Friday (Feb 14). Google has invested about US$3 billion in Anthropic, while Amazon.com is also a backer.

The Justice Department and a group of states proposed major changes to Google’s business, including a forced sale of the company’s Chrome web browser, after a federal judge last year found the company illegally monopolised online search and search ad markets. The remedy proposal also would bar Google from acquiring, investing in, or collaborating with companies that control consumer search information, including AI products.

Such a forced sale would “provide an unjustified windfall to Anthropic’s much larger competitors in the AI space – including OpenAI, Meta, and ironically Google itself, which (through its DeepMind subsidiary) markets an AI language model, Gemini”, San Francisco-based Anthropic said in the filing.

Anthropic is best known for its Claude family of large language models, which compete with ones made by OpenAI. Like its peers, the company has been raising significant sums to sustain investment in expanding its computing capabilities and keep pace in a race to advance AI.

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) raised concerns about the investments, as well as Microsoft’s investments in OpenAI. In a January report, the FTC said the companies require some of their investments into AI startups to be spent on their own products and services, which risks consolidating within the tech giants advantageous data related to chip development, model training and data centre construction. BLOOMBERG