The Irish Council for Civil Liberties says the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership should be investigated as a merger.
The Irish Council for Civil Liberties wants Microsoft to be investigated by EU regulators over its partnership with OpenAI.
The Irish Civil Liberties Group released its submission on February 2 in response to a call for comments from the European Commission. The letter begins by acknowledging the investigation and continues with a point-by-point indictment of Microsoft's treatment of OpenAI. Like anything other than a relationship.
Earlier this week, @ICCLtweet presented a request to the European Commission on the integration of the Microsoft-OpenAI “partnership” with a group of different organizations. The submission builds on our submission to the UK Competition Authority. https://t.co/2qoKKBVGIG
— Kris Shrishak (@KrisShrishak) February 2, 2024
Integration symbols
The Council's approach has been endorsed by a number of partner organisations, including Foxglove, Mozilla and the European Digital Small SME Alliance.
Texts in the document indicate that the council views Microsoft's involvement with OpenAI as going above and beyond the norm for such events.
The criticism cites Microsoft's $13-billion investment in OpenAI, as well as the latter's recent firing and subsequent rehiring of CEO and founder Sam Altman, disrupting the current arrangement.
The council then asked Microsoft to step in and reverse its decision before giving Altman and other OpenAI employees jobs to ship with OpenAI's former CEO.
The impact of artificial intelligence
“Taken together, the November 2023 leadership fight over OpenAI and other developments strongly suggest that Microsoft has had or achieved ‘significant influence' over OpenAI,” the council said.
In addition to influencing the company's decisions, the council also suggested that Microsoft was exercising monopoly power over the AI industry. The Redmond company's Azure cloud services serve as infrastructure for some OpenAI services. The Council has asked the EU Commission to investigate whether Microsoft has ultimate technological control over ChatGPT and other services.
According to the proposal, such regulation would be harmful to the marketplace and consumers:
“Allowing bigwigs to dictate how AI develops, investing their current monopoly power into future markets and technologies, and ensuring control over companies that might threaten their dominance, will increase their profit margins but not protect the public interest.”
The Microsoft-OpenAI partnership is also being scrutinized in the UK, where regulators will decide what constitutes a merger under the law.
Related: Microsoft CEO calls OpenAI partnership ‘pro-competitive' amid UK, EU merger probes