The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority had earlier sought opinions on whether Microsoft’s AI relationship with Mistral qualified as a merger before finding no regulatory objections to the partnership.

The transaction “does not qualify for investigation under the merger provisions of the Enterprise Act 2002,” the CMA stated in a brief statement on Friday.

Microsoft earlier this year invested 15 million euros ($16 million) in Mistral, a French artificial intelligence startup that was established in 2023.

As per the agreement, the French business contributes its extensive language models to the U.S. tech giant’s Azure cloud computing platform in exchange for a minority ownership in Mistral.

In order to ascertain whether agreements between the companies constitute as mergers, the CMA started soliciting opinions from interested parties in April about collaborations reached by American tech giants with smaller AI firms.

The CMA examined the minority investment agreements reached by Microsoft and Mistral as well as whether Microsoft’s employment of a few former employees of the AI company Inflection amounted to a merger as part of that endeavour. The watchdog also requested feedback on the agreements between Anthropic and Amazon.

The agency has already announced that it is no longer investigating Microsoft’s Mistral investment. Regarding its investigations into the Amazon-Inflection agreement and Microsoft’s employment of Inflection personnel, it has not provided any updates.

Microsoft previously refuted claims that its agreements with OpenAI, Mistral, and the employment of Inflection staff members amounted to mergers. Additionally, according to Amazon, their collaboration with Anthropic is a small business venture rather than a merger.

(Adapted from Bloomberg.com)