Anthropic has asked a judge to let Google keep investing in artificial intelligence (AI) startups.
The AI developer went to court Friday (Feb. 14), calling for an end to a U.S. government proposal that would prevent Google from backing AI firms, Bloomberg News reported. That proposal is part of the government’s planned remedy to fix Google’s monopolization of the online search space.
“A remedy that requires Google to terminate its relationship with Anthropic would harm both Anthropic and competition more generally,” the company’s filing said, per Bloomberg.
Google, which has invested around $3 billion in Anthropic, lost its antitrust case last year when a federal judge ruled the company held an illegal online search and search ad monopoly.
The U.S. Justice Department and states that brought the case have proposed sweeping changes to Google’s business, including the sale of its Chrome browser, and a ban on the company investing in, purchasing, or working with other firms that deal in consumer search information, AI products included.
Anthropic argues this arrangement would “provide an unjustified windfall to Anthropic’s much larger competitors in the AI space — including OpenAI, Meta, and ironically Google itself, which (through its DeepMind subsidiary) markets an AI language model, Gemini.”
As Bloomberg noted, the Justice Department is not the only federal regulator to raise concerns about massive big tech investments in AI.Â
In a report last month, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said that tech companies like Google and Microsoft require that some of their investments into AI firms be spent on their own products and/or services, which risks giving these larger companies an unfair edge when it comes to chip development, data center construction and the training of AI models.
In other AI news, PYMNTS last week examined Anthropic rival OpenAI’s long-term future as the company continues to spend — and lose — billions. Experts interviewed by PYMNTS held wildly divergent views on the company’s ultimate success or failure.
Mithilesh Ramaswamy, an AI and security engineer at Microsoft — OpenAI’s largest investor — was bullish about the company’s chances.
“I look at OpenAI’s trajectory and I can’t help but think of SpaceX,” founded 23 years ago, Ramaswamy told PYMNTS. “They, too, burned through cash at an alarming rate, pushing the boundaries of what was thought possible, facing constant skepticism.
“OpenAI seminally is building the infrastructure for a new kind of intelligence, and that’s not cheap. Sure, the losses are eye-watering, but so were SpaceX’s early rocket failures, but long term they will be successful,” Ramaswamy added.
Nathan Brunner, CEO of Boterview, said he is “very pessimistic” about OpenAI’s future, saying that there was no “secret sauce” to the company’s AI models, with open-source competitors like DeepSeek and Mistral closing in.
In apps, Brunner doesn’t think OpenAI is “well-positioned to win the product war,” noting that competitors like Google, Microsoft and Meta all have vast networks of operating systems and social media platforms with which to distribute their AI offerings.Â
“This simply looks like a losing battle for OpenAI,” Brunner concluded.
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