Britain’s competition authority, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), said Wednesday that Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI doesn’t qualify for investigation under the merger provisions of the U.K.’s Enterprise Act 2002, the country’s anticompetitive practices law.
The CMA says that the full text of its decision will be published soon.
The CMA began investigating Microsoft’s partnership in December 2023. The tech giant is a top investor in OpenAI, having poured nearly $14 billion into the AI startup. Microsoft also packages many of OpenAI’s technologies in a managed enterprise offering called the Azure OpenAI Service, and the company works closely with OpenAI to develop products like Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot and GitHub Copilot AI coding assistant.