The Microsoft logo is displayed on the smartphone.
Mateusz Slodkowski | soba pictures | Rocket Lite | Getty Images
The UK Competition and Markets Authority has cleared Microsoft's AI partnership with Mistral of regulatory concerns after previously calling for views on whether the arrangement qualifies as a merger.
The Capital Markets Authority said in a brief statement on Friday that the deal “does not qualify for investigation under the merger provisions contained in the Enterprise Law of 2002.”
CNBC has reached out to Microsoft and Mistral.
Mistral, a French AI company founded in 2023, won an investment of 15 million euros, or $16 million, from Microsoft earlier this year.
Under the terms of the deal, the US tech giant will take a minority stake in Mistral, while the French company will add its large language models to the US tech giant's Azure cloud computing platform.
In April, the CMA began seeking views from interested parties on partnerships that US tech giants have agreed with smaller AI companies to determine whether arrangements between the companies qualify as a merger.
As part of this effort, the CMA looked into minority investment deals agreed between Microsoft and Mistral, as well as whether Microsoft's employment of some former employees from AI startup Inflection constituted a merger. The watchdog separately invited comment on the arrangements between Amazon and Anthropic.
Now, the regulator says it is no longer considering Microsoft's investment in Mistral. It did not provide any update on its inquiries regarding the Amazon-Inflection deal and on Microsoft hiring employees from Inflection.
Microsoft has previously denied that its deals with OpenAI and Mistral as well as hiring employees from Inflection constitute mergers. Amazon also said its partnership with Anthropic represents a limited institutional investment, not a merger.
