Benoît Cœuré is president of the Autorité de la Concurrence, France’s competition authority, which issued an opinion on the artificial intelligence (AI) sector in June. Like its counterparts in Washington and Brussels, the regulator warned of the risk of giants like Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon using their strength in digital technology to crush this market and its start-ups.
Cœuré stressed that the French competition authority is “fully” prepared to intervene if necessary in negotiations between AI manufacturers and content producers, while the first agreements have already been signed between OpenAI and News Corp (The Wall Street Journal…), Prisa (El Pais…) and, in France, Le Monde.
How does AI pose a competition problem?
Like all digital technologies, generative AI raises competition issues, as it comes with a logical tendency towards concentration and accumulation. The more data you have, or the more users you have, the more you can innovate.
After an initial phase of abundant initiatives, we have often seen, in these sectors, a phase of consolidation until only a few players, or even one, remain. These players then run the risk of excluding their competitors or imposing unfair conditions on their customers and suppliers. They build a fortress or a walled garden.
Why are digital giants like Google, Microsoft and Meta likely to dominate AI?
Because the production of generative AI relies on inputs such as data, computing capacity – in other words, processors – and talent. Its distribution, on the other hand, relies on online service platforms in the cloud for businesses and on mobile environments, search engines and social media, for individuals.
Today, a handful of companies, most of them American, already have very strong positions in all these areas, which is a new situation. AI is the first technology to be dominated by major players from the outset. Usually, a disruptive innovation involves the replacement of technologies and ending the profits of existing players.
For example, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Netflix all started out as small players with a brilliant idea. In AI, there is, of course, the power of ideas, in smaller players like OpenAI or Mistral AI. But regulators fear that, very quickly, these will be used to reinforce the power of the big players.
What can we expect from competition investigations into the acquisition of equity stakes in AI start-ups by cloud giants that provide them with computing capacity, such as Microsoft in OpenAI or Google and Amazon in Anthropic?
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