AI is the ‘fire accelerator’ of Big Tech antitrust abuse: Andreas Mundt

The development of advanced artificial intelligence tools will act as a “first-class accelerator” of anti-competitive behaviour by Big Tech companies, Germany’s top antitrust official warned on Wednesday.

The warning by Andreas Mundt, head of Germany’s Federal Cartel Office, comes as artificial intelligence leaders such as Microsoft, Google and Nvidia face growing scrutiny from regulators in the US and European Union over concerns that they exercise too much power over the market.

Powerful AI systems “will only make all the problems worse,” says Mundt, who cited concerns that users will be unable to avoid Big Tech platforms in favor of alternative services.

“There is a huge danger that there will be an even deeper concentration of digital markets and an increase in power at various levels, from the chips to the interface” where users interact with technology platforms, Mundt said at his agency’s annual press conference, according to Bloomberg.

Mundt reportedly pointed in his remarks at Nvidia, a major supplier of chips used to train AI models that briefly became the world’s most valuable company last week.

But he said German antitrust police have not yet opened an AI-focused investigation.

Germany has seven active competition investigations focused on technology companies, including one against Microsoft, which paid $13 billion to OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

Mundt said his team is considering Microsoft’s artificial intelligence efforts as part of the ongoing investigation.

Mundt’s remarks echoed similar comments made by antitrust officials in the U.S. and Europe in recent weeks.

In the US, the Department of Justice is reportedly investigating Nvidia and whether it has violated competition laws, while the Federal Trade Commission is taking aim at Microsoft and OpenAI.

Justice Department antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter recently told the Financial Times that his team is actively investigating “monopoly bottlenecks and the competitive landscape” in artificial intelligence.

The Justice Department is currently pursuing two major antitrust lawsuits targeting internet search engine giants Google and digital advertising empires.

News publishers have prompted the feds to crack down on Google after it rolled out its “Artificial Intelligence Digests” feature that demotes traditional search results in favor of AI-generated summaries, The Post reported.

Elsewhere, the European Union’s antitrust agency has charged Apple and Microsoft in separate cases with alleged anti-competitive behavior.

Apple is accused of violating Europe’s wide-ranging Digital Markets Act through its App Store practices, including making it harder for rival app developers to “target” customers to cheaper offerings outside the Apple ecosystem.

The iPhone manufacturer may face multi-billion fines.

Microsoft is accused of potentially violating the law by bundling its Teams software with productivity applications such as Office 365 and Microsoft 365.