Microsoft’s Mistral partnership avoids merger probe by UK regulators

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has cleared Microsoft’s artificial intelligence partnership with Mistral of regulatory concerns after previously inviting views on whether the deal qualifies as a merger.

The CMA said in a brief statement on Friday that the deal “does not qualify for investigation under the mergers provisions of the Enterprises Act 2002.”

CNBC reached out to Microsoft and Mistral.

Mistral, a French artificial intelligence firm 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 gets a minority stake in Mistral, while the French company adds its large language models to the US tech giant’s Azure cloud computing platform.

In April, the CMA began seeking views from stakeholders on partnerships agreed by US tech giants with smaller AI firms to determine whether the agreements between the companies qualify as mergers.

As part of those efforts, the CMA looked into the minority investment deals agreed between Microsoft and Mistral, as well as whether Microsoft’s hiring of some former employees from AI startup Inflection constituted a merger. The Guardian separately invited comment on the agreements between Amazon and Anthropic.

The regulator now says it is no longer reviewing Microsoft’s investment in Mistral. The company has not provided an update on its inquiries into the Amazon-Inflection deal and Microsoft’s hiring of Inflection employees.

Microsoft previously denied that its deals with OpenAI and Mistral, plus the hiring of employees from Inflection, constituted mergers. Amazon also said its partnership with Anthropic represented a limited corporate investment, not a merger.