On September 18, 2023 the UK Competition and Markets Authority (“CMA”) published its initial report regarding competition and consumer protection issues implicated by artificial intelligence (“AI”) foundation models (the “CMA Report”). The CMA Report makes clear the UK agency’s intent to engage in proactive regulation of AI technology and vigorous enforcement at a time when legislators and competition regulators across the globe are heavily scrutinizing the effects of AI on the global economy. The CMA Report focuses on a variety of concerns relating to key inputs for AI foundation models (“FM”) and the effects that vertical relationships with AI startups will have on the emerging AI market.
Foundation models are very large AI models that differ from traditional AI models not only in their size — often being trained on terabytes of data — but…
