Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. must provide information to the US Federal Trade Commission on their investments and partnerships with artificial intelligence startups Anthropic PBC and OpenAI Inc. as part of an agency study announced Thursday.

The antitrust and consumer protection agency said it sent subpoenas to the companies to gather information on how the development of AI is impacting the competitive landscape. The inquiry focuses on more than US$19 billion in investments by Microsoft, Amazon and Google, in a series of transactions that cemented alliances between the world’s cloud services giants with the leading providers of artificial intelligence software.

Antitrust enforcers across the world have become concerned as many of the most promising AI startups now depend heavily on the old guard of dominant tech companies for their financing and infrastructure needs.

In comments during a public workshop Thursday, FTC Chair Lina Khan said the agency is closely monitoring the industry and warned that AI companies “cannot use claims of innovation as cover for law breaking.”

“There is no AI exemption from the laws on the books,” she said.

Google and Anthropic declined to comment. Microsoft, Amazon, and OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

The inquiry comes as technology giants take a bigger role in backing nimble AI startups in a bid to claim a stake in the booming sector. Over the past year, Microsoft has revamped nearly all of its products around AI tools powered by OpenAI’s AI mode, while Google has said it has plans to embed its most powerful large language model, Gemini, into its experimental search tool sometime this year.

Microsoft has invested more than $13 billion in the ChatGPT maker OpenAI and the ouster of its CEO Sam Altman in November exposed how inextricably linked Microsoft and the company have become. Those ties have spurred antitrust reviews in both the UK and the European Union.

Meanwhile, Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, who left the company amid differences over the direction of the business. Alphabet’s Google in October committed to back it with $2 billion, and earlier this year Amazon agreed to an investment of as much as $4 billion.

The FTC is conducting the inquiry under its so-called 6(b) authority that allows it to issue subpoenas to conduct market studies. The agency generally issues a report on its findings after analyzing the information from companies, though that process can take years to complete. The agency is still finalizing the results of studies on pharmaceutical middlemen and supply chains that it started in 2021 and 2022.  

Although the information is collected for research purposes, the FTC can use any details it gleans to open official investigations or aid in existing probes. Last summer, the agency opened an investigation into whether OpenAI has violated consumer protection laws with its popular ChatGPT conversational AI bot.

The FTC and its sister agency, the Justice Department, share jurisdiction over antitrust probes and have been debating internally which should take the lead on the AI. The Justice Department has generally handled antitrust issues related to Microsoft since its blockbuster monopolization case against the Windows maker in the late 1990s. The FTC, however, recently handled Microsoft’s acquisition of game developer Activision Blizzard Inc.

In addition, the European Commission is looking into some of the agreements that have been concluded between large digital market players and generative AI developers and providers. The European Commission is investigating the impact of these partnerships on market dynamics.

With assistance from Shirin Ghaffary, Julia Love, Matt Day and Jackie Davalos.