Anthropic’s Antitrust Advantage

Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images.

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As officials from Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission scrutinize the role that cloud providers play in OpenAI and Anthropic, one thing they should recognize quickly is that the two startups’ relationships with their big cloud-shareholders are not the same. Anthropic has a lot more independence from its shareholders than OpenAI.

For instance, Microsoft has access to the weights of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, which means that they could recreate much of the AI software OpenAI has been building, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who spoke with my colleague Aaron Holmes. That’s not the case with Anthropic: Google and Amazon, which have both invested in the startup, do not get access to its model weights, according to two people familiar with the agreement who spoke with Maria Heeter and me.

The bottom line: if the FTC is to take action as a result of the investigation it opened last week into the multibillion-dollar investments Microsoft, Google and Amazon have made in the startups, it should pay attention to the details.