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it home reported on september 4 that the uk antitrust regulator, the competition and markets authority (cma), approved microsoft's investment in inflection ai today, saying that microsoft's hiring of former inflection ai employees and cooperation with the startup did not pose a threat to competition, so no full investigation would be conducted.

image source: pexels

in march this year, microsoft agreed to pay $650 million (it home note: currently about 4.628 billion yuan) to obtain ai software licenses from ai startup inflection ai. in addition, microsoft also announced the hiring of inflection ai co-founders mustafa suleyman and karen simonyan, as well as most of the company's employees. inflection ai is valued at about $4 billion, and industry insiders believe that microsoft's move is equivalent to acquiring inflection ai in disguise at a low price.

in april, the cma invited comments from relevant third parties, seeking their opinions on whether the transaction complies with uk merger regulations and its impact on market competition. in july, the cma announced the launch of a phase 1 investigation into the transaction.

the cma said today that even before the acquisition, inflection ai had a small share of the uk chatbot and ai tool market and was unable to grow or maintain its user base as significantly as its competitors. therefore, the cma decided that there was no need for a more in-depth second phase investigation and approved the transaction.

in addition to the uk, the us federal trade commission (ftc) also launched a review of the transaction in june this year and issued subpoenas to microsoft and inflection ai, requesting relevant documents from the past two years.