Asia Tech Wire (Oct 25) -- The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK's antitrust authority, announced on Thursday that it has launched an investigation into the partnership between Google's parent company Alphabet and artificial intelligence startup Anthropic.

The CMA set a deadline of Dec. 19 to make a decision on the first phase of the investigation, at which point it will decide whether to proceed.

Nearly two years after Microsoft-backed OpenAI sparked an AI boom with the release of its chatbot ChatGPT, regulators around the world are increasingly concerned about partnership agreements between large tech companies and smaller AI startups.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by siblings Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, former OpenAI executives.

The company announced a $500 million investment from Alphabet last year. Meanwhile, Alphabet has promised to invest another $1.5 billion over time.

The CMA has been evaluating Alphabet's partnership with Anthropic since July. At that time, the UK regulator also began seeking advice on whether the deal would undermine competition in the UK.

Prior to that, the CMA had also opened investigations into Microsoft's investment in Inflection AI and Amazon's investment in Anthropic, but ultimately approved both deals.

Last September, Amazon invested $1.25 billion in Anthropic. And in March, Amazon invested an additional $2.75 billion in Anthropic, bringing the total investment to $4 billion, making it the largest investment in a company in Amazon's nearly 30 years of existence.