On 4 September 2024, the Competition and Market Authority (CMA) cleared Microsoft’s hiring of certain former employees of, and its entry into associated arrangement with, Inflection, a developer of AI Foundation Models and conversational AI tools. Alongside a jurisdictional question of whether this constituted a merger, the CMA investigated whether the hiring would result in a lessening of competition in the development of either Foundation Models or “consumer chatbots”. The CMA dismissed both concerns based on the degree of competition in the Foundation Model space and because Inflection’s solutions were found not to be a significant competitive constraint.
A CRA team including Dr Oliver Latham, Dr Matteo Foschi, Dr Mauricio Chikitani, Jakub Drabik, Liam Connolly, and Steven Yang advised Microsoft on the matter.
More details are available on the CMA website at this link.
