Regulators Take on the Giants of A.I.

Jonathan Kanter, the Justice Department’s antitrust chief, and Lina Khan, the chair of the F.T.C., are intensifying their scrutiny of artificial intelligence giants including Microsoft and Nvidia.Credit…Graeme Sloan/Sipa, via Reuters

An A.I. antitrust fight is coming

Nvidia has joined the $3 trillion valuation club as a blistering A.I. rally has turned it into the world’s second-most valuable company behindMicrosoft.

Both companies are at the center of the artificial intelligence boom that has lifted the wider S&P 500 — and both have attracted regulatory scrutiny of the sector’s biggest players.

The F.T.C. and Justice Department are set to proceed with antitrust investigations against the duo, and OpenAI, writes The Times’s David McCabe. The F.T.C. is already looking into Microsoft, according to The Wall Street Journal, over how the company structured a deal with the start-up Inflection AI to avoid scrutiny.

In March, Microsoft hired almost all of the start-up’s staff and agreed to pay around $650 million to license its technology.

The deal added to Microsoft’s leading A.I. position. The company has stakes in OpenAI, the French start-up Mistral and Abu Dhabi’s G42, and it has also partnered with those businesses to develop and deploy A.I.

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems.)