The Federal Trade Commission in the United States is digging into Amazon’s hiring of top figures from AI startup Adept, Reuters reported, and its British counterpart has begun a formal inquiry into Microsoft’s mass hiring of staff from Inflection—a move the FTC is already scrutinizing. (Reuters, The Logic)

Talking point: Both Adept and Inflection still exist as independent entities, but both deals involved moves of key staff from the smaller companies to the bigger ones and hefty payments going the other way. The question for regulators is whether the deals are corporate buyouts in all but name, acquisitions that would trigger competition examinations if they’d been done the traditional way. Adept aims to automate online corporate workflows with the help of artificial intelligence; Inflection has been working on an “empathetic” large language model chatbot. Adept raised US$350 million in a single round last year; Inflection topped that with a US$1.3-billion round a few months later.