The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is probing whether Microsoft’s US$650-million licensing agreement was a deal structured to evade American competition law. Microsoft hired most of Inflection’s staff, and used its large language model in Microsoft consumer services like Bing. (The Wall Street Journal)

Talking point: U.S. mergers and acquisitions worth more than US$119.5 million have to be reported to the FTC so it can decide whether to examine them for anti-competitive consequences. In this case, Inflection remains a standalone company, making the deal officially not an acquisition, despite the departures in March of two of its three co-founders—blue-chip AI researchers Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan—for senior posts at Microsoft, along with much of their team. Inflection moved its LLM to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. Microsoft is also a major investor in OpenAI and its ChatGPT language model.