Microsoft's multibillion-dollar investment in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI could trigger a European Union merger investigation, the bloc's executive branch said Tuesday.
The European Commission said it's "checking whether Microsoft's investment in OpenAI might be reviewable" under regulations covering mergers and acquisitions that would harm competition in the 27-nation EU.
The review could lead to a formal investigation into whether the deal should be unconditionally cleared, allowed with concessions from the companies or blocked. Britain's antitrust watchdog opened a similar review last month.
Antitrust enforcers in the U.S. also have signaled concerns about competition in the AI industry. The Federal Trade Commission in November approved new measures enabling it to more easily investigate AI products and services, noting that "AI can raise competition issues in a variety of ways, including if one or just a few companies control the essential inputs or technologies that underpin AI."
OpenAI has received several rounds of funding from Microsoft, including an initial $1 billion in 2019 and a multibillion-dollar investment last year.
OpenAI's generative AI chatbot ChatGPT has captured world attention with its advanced capabilities, catapulting the San Francisco-based startup to the top ranks of AI companies. Generative AI systems like ChatGPT can spit out new text, images, videos or audio recordings based on prompts from users.
The European Commission, the bloc's top antitrust enforcer, is asking businesses and experts for input on any competition issues that they see in generative AI and has asked "several large digital players" — which it didn't identify — for information.
The commission is "also closely monitoring AI partnerships to ensure they do not unduly distort market dynamics," the EU's antitrust enforcer, Margrethe Vestager, said in a press release.
Vestager is due to meet with OpenAI executives on a trip this week to the U.S., as well as Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
Harvey Weinstein hit with new sex crime charge in New York
Harvey Weinstein pleaded not guilty Wednesday to a new sex crime charge in New York, as he awaits retrial in his landmark #MeToo case.
Details of the new allegations were not immediately available. He was charged with committing a criminal sex act.
The jailed ex-movie mogul has long maintained that any sexual activity was consensual.
Prosecutors revealed last week that Weinstein had been indicted on additional sex crime charges that weren't part of the case that led to his now-overturned 2020 conviction. But the new indictment was sealed until his arraignment.
Prosecutors have said that the grand jury heard evidence of up to three alleged assaults — two in hotels in the Tribeca neighborhood and one at a lower Manhattan residential building. The purported incidents took place from the mid-2000s to 2016, prosecutors said.
But it's not clear whether any of those allegations underlie the new indictment.
While bracing for the new charges, Weinstein also is awaiting retrial after New York state's highest court this spring overturned his 2020 conviction on rape and sexual assault charges involving two women. The high court, called the Court of Appeals, ordered a new trial, which is tentatively scheduled to begin Nov. 12.
The Court of Appeals ruled that the then-trial judge unfairly allowed testimony against him based on allegations that were not part of the case. That judge's term expired in 2022, and he is no longer on the bench.
Prosecutors have said they'll seek to fold the new charges into the retrial, but Weinstein's lawyers say it should be a separate case.
Weinstein, who also was convicted in 2022 in a Los Angeles rape case, remains behind bars while awaiting his New York retrial.
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