Microsoft's Mistral partnership avoids merger probe by British regulators

The U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority cleared Microsoft's AI partnership with Mistral of regulatory concerns after previously inviting views on whether the arrangement qualified as a merger.

Under the terms of the deal, the U.S. tech giant receives a minority stake in Mistral, while the French company adds its large language models to the U.S. tech giant's Azure cloud computing platform. As part of that effort, the CMA looked into the minority investment deals agreed by Microsoft and Mistral, as well as into whether Microsoft's hiring of certain former employees from AI startup Inflection constitutes a merger. The watchdog separately invited comment on the arrangements between Amazon and Anthropic.

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