U.K.’s competition authority says Microsoft’s OpenAI partnership doesn’t quality for investigation

Britain’s competition authority, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), said Wednesday that Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI doesn’t qualify for investigation under the merger provisions of the U.K.’s Enterprise Act 2002, the country’s anticompetitive practices law.

“Overall, taking into account all of the available evidence, particularly in light of recent developments in the partnership which reduce OpenAI’s reliance on Microsoft for compute, the CMA does not believe that Microsoft currently controls OpenAI’s commercial policy, and instead exerts a high level of material influence over that policy,” the CMA wrote in its decision. “In other words there is no change of control giving rise to a relevant merger situation.”

The CMA began investigating Microsoft’s partnership in December 2023. The tech giant is a top investor in OpenAI, having poured nearly $14 billion into the AI startup. Microsoft also packages many of OpenAI’s technologies in a managed offering called the Azure OpenAI Service, and it works closely with OpenAI to develop products like Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot and GitHub Copilot AI coding assistant.