(Reuters) – The U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission are in discussions over which agency can probe OpenAI on antitrust grounds, including the AI firm’s partnership with Microsoft, Politico reported on Friday, citing three people with knowledge of the matter.
Microsoft’s tie-up with the ChatGPT maker has raised antitrust scrutiny after the U.S. software giant committed to invest over $10 billion into OpenAI last year.
Earlier this month, EU antitrust regulators flagged that Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI might be reviewable under European Union merger rules, after a similar warning was placed by Britain’s antitrust regulator in December.
The FTC initiated talks with the DOJ months ago to figure out which one can review the matter, but neither agency is ready to give up jurisdiction, the report said.
The talks are mostly limited to Microsoft and OpenAI and are not part of a broader dialogue over which agency will investigate artificial intelligence issues, according to the report.
Microsoft declined to comment, when contacted by Reuters.
There is a separate interagency debate that started more recently over who can investigate these companies for allegedly illegally scraping content from websites to train their AI models, the report added.
(Reporting by Harshita Mary Varghese; Editing by Shailesh Kuber)
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