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The UK Competition and Markets Authority has allayed regulatory concerns after previously seeking advice on whether Microsoft and Mistral’s artificial intelligence collaboration qualifies for a merger.
The CMA said in a brief statement on Friday that the deal “does not qualify for investigation under the merger provisions of the Corporations Act 2002”.
CNBC has contacted Microsoft and Mistral.
Mistral is a French artificial intelligence company founded in 2023 that received a 15 million euro ($16 million) investment from Microsoft earlier this year.
Under the terms of the deal, the U.S. tech giant will take a minority stake in Mistral, while the French company adds its large-scale language model to the U.S. tech giant’s Azure cloud computing platform.
In April this year, the CMA began consulting stakeholders on partnerships struck by US tech giants and smaller artificial intelligence companies to determine whether the arrangements between the companies qualify as mergers.
As part of this work, the CMA investigated whether a minority investment deal between Microsoft and Mistral, as well as Microsoft’s hiring of certain former employees of artificial intelligence startup Inflection, constituted a merger. The regulator separately invited comments on the arrangement between Amazon and Anthropic.
Now, regulators say they are no longer investigating Microsoft’s investment in Mistral. It did not provide an update on the Amazon-Inflection deal or the investigation into Microsoft’s hiring of Inflection employees.
Microsoft has previously denied that its deals with OpenAI and Mistral and its hiring of employees from Inflection constituted mergers. Amazon also said its partnership with Anthropic represents a limited corporate investment, not a merger.
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