FTC Investigates AI Collusion – and Finds Nothing
By Paul Steidler: On Lina Khan’s last full day as Chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the FTC issued a long-anticipated report on one of her top priorities for the past year – investigating how Big Tech might be harming AI competition – and found nothing.
“Our study will shed light on whether investments and partnerships pursued by dominant companies risk distorting innovation and undermining fair competition,” said Chair Khan in announcing the study on January 25, 2024. She doubled down on this in interviews and speeches, including to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Chair Khan has operated like a reckless prosecutor who could get an indictment splashed on the front page while the acquittal was buried later on.
The January 17, 2025 FTC report, issued in a low-key, obligatory manner simply does not have any disturbing findings. As the study says, it examined “three partnerships involving generative artificial intelligence: Microsoft-OpenAI, Amazon-Anthropic, and Google-Anthropic. These partnerships involve relationships between the world’s largest Cloud Service Providers and two of the most prominent AI model developers.”
There is discussion of how there could be problems, why the report is important, the context in which the study is being done, and how it will help in the study of other companies in the future. The staff writing this report seems to want to distance itself from Chair Khan and her proclamations, recognizing they got stuck with writing a nothing-burger.
As stated in the report, “Staff notes that this report is not a formal legal or economic analysis of the partnerships or markets and should not be interpreted as such.”
There are abundant signs of AI competition all around us. The day before the FTC report, The Wall Street Journal reported reported that Google is pushing to have its Gemini AI chatbot technology used by 500 million people by the end of 2025 as it seeks to surpass ChatGPT.
On January 7, Crunchbase reported, “2024 was the breakout year for funding to AI companies” with venture funding to U.S. companies totaling $178 billion – around 57% of global funding.
Regardless of former Chair Khan’s attempts to raise fears otherwise, AI competition is alive and well in the U.S.