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While patent expiration has important impacts on parties other than the patentee, it also significantly affects the incentives and behavior of the patentee itself. Here again, most of the relevant studies focus on the pharmaceutical industry. Not surprisingly, one response of firms facing patent expiration is to engage in strategic behavior to extend exclusivity with little or no new innovation.138 Pharmaceutical patentees engage in “lifecycle management” by launching “authorized” generics prior to patents expiring on their brand drugs, practicing “evergreening” by which they patent incremental variations of a base drug, and obtaining FDA approval for new uses of existing drugs for which patents will soon expire.139 Pharmaceutical companies facing impending patent expiration have also engaged in “reverse payment” settlements with generic companies to delay the latter’s entry into the market.140 In other cases, firms facing patent expirations engage in mergers and acquisitions to shore up market share and revenues while actually decreasing aggregate expenditures on R&D.141 In short, impending patent expiration can motivate patentees to extend exclusivity in minimally innovative (and sometimes innovation- dampening) ways.142

Importantly, however, patent expiration can also motivate patentees to continue innovating. In this sense, impending expiration provides the constant pressure to innovate at the heart of churn. Technology firms are ongoing concerns that assume debts, lease facilities, and build up reliance interests on the expectation of continued revenue streams sustaining their operations. While the unit of analysis in patent law is usually a single innovation, a dynamic view of business lifecycles reveals that no technology firm can long sustain itself with just a single innovation. Furthermore, given the long time required to develop innovations and the probability that many of them will fail, firms cannot wait for a key patent to expire before initiating the next round of research and development. Rather, expiration of the patent term provides an impetus for established firms to innovate continuously.

MIT Sloan study shows the power of patents to impact innovation

Winners of patent races conduct 14% more follow-on research

All three branches of government behave as though an innovative nation requires not only strong intellectual property protection but also freedom from antitrust restriction, while a consumer-friendly marketplace requires both the strict enforcement of pro-competition antitrust laws and the limitation of patent rights in the face of those laws. In this Part, we argue that this understanding is too limited and that, in fact, both policies promote the same goals. In the words of former FTC Chair Timothy Muris: "Properly understood, IP law and antitrust law both seek to promote innovation and enhance consumer welfare." 147 The two legal areas are interdependent-each relies on consistency and proper calibration in the other realm in order to fully achieve its own goals. We acknowledge that the two realms sometimes come into conflict and, in these instances, one must yield to the other. But patent law is fairly specifically spelled out in statute, and antitrust law is an expansive regime with "very few cracks";148 therefore, the government can implement a policy vision through enforcement choices. Instead of favoring one area at the expense of the other, courts and agencies should enforce antitrust law with an eye toward the balance between competition and company protection that Congress has enshrined in the patent law.

A. Scholarship at the Intersection

In the present study, we elucidated that the formation of a market monopoly can be prevented by antitrust intervention into a firm’s patent consolidation while encouraging the development of follow-on innovation. Our conclusion suggests further elaboration on the modern understanding of the relationship between antitrust and patent laws is necessary, at least when it comes to innovation. The two laws become complementary when the right to access the substituting patents on an upstream technology is distributed across innovators; when the patents are owned by a single firm, complementarity between antitrust and patent law may not work. This implication echoes the ongoing policy and scholarly discussion on how the modern antitrust law should accommodate technological innovation (Katz and Shelanski, 2005; Khan, 2016; Sidak and Teece, 2009). Thus far, the discussion concerning the necessity of accommodating the Schumpeterian view on the relationship between market competition and innovation has been largely theoretical. Moreover, how the antitrust law plays a role in promoting technological innovation remains an open question. Our study suggests that firms’ patent consolidation through patent transfer is one of the venues where antitrust law enforcement can shape market competition and technological innovation. This implication also indicates the importance of extending the scope of antitrust intervention into “patent-only” transfers in cooperation with patent policymakers to promote market competition and technological innovation.

In response to this saga of laws in tension, courts and commentators began to argue that antitrust and patent law were more properly viewed as complementary, because ―both are aimed at encouraging innovation, industry and competition.‖3 In their recent report on antitrust, IP, and innovation, the antitrust enforcement agencies argued that: [A]ntitrust and intellectual property are properly perceived as complementary bodies of law that work together to bring innovation to consumers: antitrust laws protect robust competition in the marketplace, while intellectual property laws protect the ability to earn a return on the investments necessary to innovate. Both spur competition among rivals to be the first to enter the marketplace with a desirable technology, product, or service.4 So antitrust and patent law both try to stimulate innovation: the former by stimulating competition, and the latter by temporarily suppressing it.5

We have two conceptions of the relationship between antitrust and patent: in tension or complementary. In reality, both conceptions have an element of truth, but antitrust and patent are neither always in tension nor always complementary. Rather, the relationship is multidimensional. Antitrust law and patent law are in tension in some contexts, particularly in the short run. For example, a patent holder can exclude infringing competitors from the market, even if the competitors can make the product more efficiently. In the long run, after the patent expires, consumers can purchase the innovation in a competitive marketplace.

Current Relationship Between Antitrust And Intellectual Property Law

Today, the federal antitrust enforcement agencies recognize a much closer and interconnected relationship between antitrust law and intellectual property rights.(14) The FTC and DOJ no longer consider the two bodies of law to conflict. The agencies' current thinking is summarized quite well in the Federal Circuit's 1990 opinion in Atari Games Corp. v. Nintendo of America, Inc., in which the Federal Circuit stated: "[t]he aims and objectives of patent and antitrust laws may seem, at first glance, wholly at odds. However, the two bodies of law are complementary, as both are aimed at encouraging innovation, industry and competition."(15)

Intellectual property and antitrust are especially relevant as we approach the new century because it is more important than ever to encourage innovation and competition, both of which enhance consumer welfare. Innovations are among the most valuable assets of American businesses, and in today's global economy, companies must innovate if they hope to survive and thrive. This is true in industries as diverse as computer hardware and software, biotechnology, aerospace, and pharmaceuticals. Companies generate wealth and employment by generating new ideas and developing them into improved products. Consumers, in turn, benefit enormously from these innovations.

Innovating companies--ranging from modest research boutiques to giant aerospace-defense contractors--all depend vitally on a legal framework that ensures a competitive market while protecting the rights of inventors and allowing innovators to profit from their ideas and inventions. Many attorneys bear responsibility for charting companies' paths through this framework. This responsibility is a real challenge because innovation moves so quickly and change is the norm. It is my hope that this article will make the job a little easier by enhancing knowledge of the antitrust aspects of the legal framework.

Today, it is widely recognized that patent and antitrust drive innovation in different but complementary ways. Both disciplines promote dynamic efficiency: that is, a system of property rights and market rules that create appropriate incentives for invention, innovation, and risk taking—delivering the greatest returns for society not just for today, but tomorrow as well. The patent grant does this by providing incentives for inventors to take risks and make investments in research and development. Patents transform a claimed piece of intellectual progress into a property right, allowing the inventor to exclude others from using that invention during the term of the patent. Our intellectual property framework further advances follow-on innovation through public disclosure of the invention. Antitrust's core mission is to appropriately foster and protect the competitive environment by preventing certain conduct that threatens free markets. This environment is what pushes companies to constantly innovate and allows them to profit when they do. Antitrust recognizes the critical role that intellectual property rights play in driving innovation and so values these rights. Yet antitrust applies the same analytical framework to intellectual property as it does to other forms of property, and imposes some rules about how the patent monopoly can—and cannot—be used. Thus, antitrust and patent law work together to create and preserve the appropriate incentives for technological progress by creating property rights and preserving competition around those rights.

Antitrust is grounded in the principle that competition is good for the consumer, and that anticompetitive behaviors such as unreasonable restraints of trade, monopolistic conduct, price fixing, and price discrimination are suspect. On the surface, intellectual property and antitrust might appear to be inherently incompatible. After all, prevention of monopolistic conduct is an explicit antitrust purpose,62 where stopping such conduct is seen as “protect[ing] the process of competition for the benefit of consumers, making sure there are strong incentives for businesses to operate efficiently, keep prices down, and keep quality up.”63 On the other hand, copyright is a monopoly legitimized by Congress, and as noted in a later section (see Misuse), courts have no expectations that these monopoly owners foster competition or keep costs down.

However, once one takes a look at the actual descriptions within antitrust, it becomes apparent that the monopolies bestowed by copyright are not the same as the monopolies seen to endanger the economy. An antitrust violation often involves an actor abusing market power, where market power is defined as “the ability profitably to maintain prices above, or output below, competitive levels for a significant period of time.”64 It is unlikely that an individual author will ever hold market power such that she would run afoul of antitrust laws. Corporations who own parts of the rights within copyright, though, may engage in behaviors that would draw antitrust scrutiny. Thus, where Congressional-granted monopolies would not by themselves raise antitrust concerns, how those monopolies are used might.

To make good on its consumer welfare goals, a realignment of antitrust law is needed to promote climate progress in America. In  recently published in the Harvard Business Review, Matteo Gasparini et al. cites a survey finding 60 percent of companies are deterred from climate collaboration due to antitrust concerns. This is problematic because industry-wide collaboration is critical to address climate change. Collaboration helps mitigate the first-mover disadvantage, challenges that come with being the first firm to change their business strategy. In the context of sustainability, actions businesses take to decarbonize can be costly, resulting in higher prices and lower margins in the short run. So those who invest in sustainable transformation may find themselves at a competitive disadvantage. Collective industry action is one way to resolve this, as it ensures that competitors adopt costly practices simultaneously. Without collaboration, firm-level action is far less likely. Thus, when fear of antitrust violations deters collaboration, it deters climate action more broadly.

In  published in the Hastings Law Journal, Amelia Miazad echoes this assessment, and points out an additional flaw of antitrust doctrine: it falsely assumes that collaboration on social and environmental goals is anti-competitive. To illustrate this point, Miazad references when four automakers reached a voluntary agreement with the State of California in 2019 to establish vehicle emissions standards that were stricter than national levels. In response, the Department of Justice launched an  on the basis that this collaboration was anti-competitive by limiting the vehicle types offered to consumers. Ultimately, the probe was . While this probe has been criticized as politically motivated, Miazad argues that it underscores the disconnect between economic and non-economic goals in antitrust law. The automakers’ collaboration reflects a recognition that the auto industry is threatened by climate change with , , and . Addressing this risk is an economic decision that is needed to maintain profitability. Ultimately, Miazad concludes that antitrust law should remain firmly tethered to economic considerations. However, these considerations must also weigh the economic impacts of climate change.

Four major agritech corporations now account for 60 percent of the global seed market. It's time to change that.

Earlier this month, PepsiCo stepped down from a controversial league battle with Indian farmers over use of their patented potato seeds.

There is growing consensus in the United States that corporations need to disclose more about their activities and outcomes to include important environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data. The move to require this information is based on a desire to improve the operation of capital markets. Capital markets function effectively—providing accurate market signals about corporate performance and allocating finance efficiently—when participants are well informed about how corporations are currently performing and how they are positioned to respond to changes on the horizon. As conditions in the economy have changed, the set of information needed by capital markets has expanded beyond the calculation of immediate profit and loss. Climate change, which is altering the physical environment and producing a widening range of governmental responses, requires capital market participants to take into account possibly sharp changes in business conditions.1 Increased focus on social equity and economic inequality means that demographic, occupational, and compensation data on a firm’s employees take on new importance for consumer behavior and business operation and success.2

While efforts to expand corporate disclosures along these dimensions are under way at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), there is good reason why ESG disclosures also ought to include markers that reflect the market power of firms and competitive conditions in the markets in which they operate. Just as the economy relies on capital markets to allocate finance, it also relies on competition in product markets to incentivize adaptation and innovation. When product markets are competitive, higher rates of return are signals that firms are especially productive or that supply is insufficient relative to demand. Directing finance to higher-profit firms under these conditions would help to increase efficiency, which is socially beneficial and something that capital markets ideally would accomplish.

Competition policy and antitrust law are experiencing a global renaissance. New market realities such as digital market gatekeepers, the financialization of firms, highly concentrated markets, a rising labor movement, industrial policy, and trade wars, among others, are radically reshaping how this policy area is understood and applied. Sustainability concerns have also been a driving force for reconstituting antitrust to meet twenty-first century challenges. It is now widely accepted that competition policy – both its aims and its enforcement – has wider societal impacts beyond competition, including effects on democracy, economic inequality, growth and innovation, racial and gender imbalances, privacy, geopolitical implications and more. Its effects on the environment can also no longer be ignored. Increasingly, private-sector firms say that antitrust is chilling the mobilization of non-state actors to address climate change and other sustainability challenges. Activities such as joint standard-setting, industry-wide competitor collaborations, and information sharing have raised new questions and controversies. Coordinated engagement by investors and financial institutions has become a particular target of politicized attack in the United States, further muddying the waters. These trends have generated confusion among private actors regarding permissible behavior, which has prompted many international competition agencies to issue updated guidelines. Although a common narrative emphasizes that antitrust law is getting in the way of coordination, antitrust law is, fundamentally, an allocator of coordination rights.3 It defines what kind of market coordination is pro-social or benign, and where private actor coordination becomes anti-social (for example, cartel behavior). Competition agencies, since their inception, have wrestled with how to define what constitutes pro-social coordination, and how to measure any anti-competitive harms against other social and economic benefits. For these reasons, competition policy is a profound shaper of markets. Competition enforcers and regulators must grapple with the role that it can play in advancing or hindering sustainability objectives. Various competition agencies define the scope of sustainability considerations differently, but broadly they can include: mitigating environmental impacts, accelerating the energy transition to clean energy, protecting human rights, and advancing worker rights and prosperity. Vigorous debates about the normative goal of competition policy have renewed urgency. For every position on what antitrust law should accomplish, differences in methodology and technical implementation follow. Biden administration antitrust enforcers are experimenting with a wholesale revival of the antimonopoly origins of antitrust and are exercising long-dormant enforcement authorities, focusing on addressing concentrations of power and protecting the competitive process. Due to both the increasingly politicized nature of the debate in the US, and the Neo-Brandesian belief that ancillary benefits like environmental or social benefits follow from increased market competition, US agencies largely remain silent on sustainability issues. Instead, the US is debating and experimenting with what new goal should replace the longstanding “consumer welfare standard” that has guided antitrust application for more than four decades. The US federated system – whereby states enforce their own antitrust laws parallel to federal law enforcement – creates additional complexity. In contrast, Europe is still largely operating under the consumer welfare standard, expanding who is considered a ‘consumer’ (“in market” or “out of market”) while moving to new semantic versions like the ‘citizen welfare standard,’ which allow for a wider set of welfare considerations beyond price or efficiency gains. Compared to the US, the EU, UK, and Dutch agency approaches to sustainability collaborations are more permissive, more experimental, and more oriented around exceptions and safe harbors. European agencies are now directly incorporating environmental and other sustainability concerns into their mandates and updated guidelines. Using the long-standing “balance of harms” approach for sustainability collaborations raises new and substantial challenges of measurement and enforcement. The anti-ESG (“Environmental, Social, Governance”) narrative battles have also heightened focus on financial institution coalitions such as the Global Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), Climate Action 100+, Ceres, and others. In the US, Republican Attorneys General and Congressional representatives have launched investigations for alleged antitrust violations. The claim that coordinated behavior among financial institutions such as banks, asset managers, or insurers is a violation of antitrust, and a “collective boycott” in particular, has dominated headlines, although no lawsuits have been brought to date. As the political pushback has intensified, some major asset managers and insurers have withdrawn from their respective climate alliances. The rising anti-ESG movement overlaps and intertwines with antitrust concerns but must be parsed closely to differentiate narrative fiction from legal reality. In the US, state-level anti-ESG bills employ “boycott” language but are more concerned with questions of fiduciary duty than antitrust violations. Nevertheless, the coordinated statelevel activity means that firm risk from purported antitrust violation investigations is difficult to mitigate, even if federal agencies offered updated guidelines or safe harbors (as other international competition agencies are doing). For this reason, it is nearly impossible to provide a unified US approach to these questions, in contrast to international jurisdictions. Other industries – like fashion and agriculture – claim that a “first mover disadvantage” afflicts companies pursuing sustainability goals which may entail higher costs. For this reason, they assert that collective action amongst competitors – such as standard-setting and industry association activities, collective purchasing requirements or mandatory standards, information sharing, and others – is an important way to institute needed reforms, and they perceive antitrust as standing in the way of these collaborations. Most competition agencies have long-standing competitor collaboration guidelines to inform businesses about what kinds of collaborations are permissible under the law; there is also existing case law which has provided clarity on various kinds of collaborations. But some collaborations and activities with sustainability objectives continue to raise challenging questions. Some contend that antitrust’s focus on reducing prices or maximizing output is fundamentally in tension with sustainability goals. Competition agencies now wrestle with what amount of a reduction of competition among firms – if any – should be permissible to obtain certain sustainability benefits. How should agencies assess the benefits and harms of restrictions of competition against consumer or citizen benefits? And does this require legislative change, or simply updated guidelines? Discussions about how sustainability benefits should be quantified, to whom, and over what time horizon are ongoing. These technical questions absorb much of the European dialogue on “green antitrust.” However, it is worth noting that competition agencies have wrestled with technical questions relating to competitor collaborations for decades. Historically, competitor collaborations have been assessed using the lens of maximizing efficiency, rather than sustainability benefits. So, while the weighing of benefits and harms of these collaborations is not new to competition policy, ‘sustainability gains’ are becoming the new ‘efficiency gains’ that companies propose as deserving of new regulatory or legislative carve outs. To provide increased clarity on these issues in the US, financial institution coalitions and other non-financial industry collaborations can seek advisory opinions or business reviews from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). They can also request that the FTC use its power to compel information (known as 6(b) authority, from section 6 of the FTC Act) to conduct market studies on critical industries relevant to energy transition or sustainability, which may raise new questions about permissible collaborations. This can help the agency investigate the unique competitive dynamics of a relevant industry, and perhaps yield specific case studies for updated competitor collaboration guidelines which would take sustainability oriented collaborations into consideration. Concurrently, the whole-of-government approach to competition policy – instituted under President Biden’s Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy in July 2021 – provides an opportunity to infuse sustainability considerations through existing interagency collaborations. While the FTC and DOJ are primarily responsible for enforcing the federal antitrust laws, other agencies such as the Department of Transportation, US Department of Agriculture, National Labor Relations Board, and many others also have antitrust authority. And increasingly, the FTC and DOJ have memorandums of understanding (MOUs) with other federal agencies, and often comment on rulemakings, as they intersect with competition concerns. At a time where the antitrust agencies are politically constrained from engaging questions of sustainability directly, they can support other agencies which may consider sustainability considerations in their rulemaking and other regulatory actions. Ultimately, competition policy and its enforcement agencies are one component of a broad policy framework that shapes private sector activities and their alignment with, or contributions to, climate or other policy objectives. Incentivizing private actors to align their practices with sustainability and climate goals will require policies and regulations throughout the economy. Antitrust policies and agencies should be a coherent part of this robust policy framework.

Ask voters about American politics, and they typically respond that it is ever more polarized, fragmented, divisive, and hyperpartisan. A recent report indicated that 78 percent of voters are unhappy with increasing partisan divisions. Beyond the issue of polarization, there is also a problem of performance. Satisfaction with American political institutions is decreasing. The dominant popular feeling toward the federal government is frustration—a sentiment now shared by 57 percent of Americans according to a March 2019 Pew survey. Surveys of public trust in the government tell a similar story, continuing the decades-long decline from the height of public trust in the early 1960s. Yet, at the same time, sizable majorities support increased federal spending on education, infrastructure, Medicare, and scientific research; thus the sentiment of frustration seems clearly tied to the government’s ineffectiveness in these areas, not simply ideological opposition to government in general.

Political fragmentation and distrust, whatever the cause, are often interpreted as signs of a decaying democratic system. But the usual response to this situation—another round of hand-wringing about civility—inevitably accomplishes nothing. Today’s combination of dissatisfaction and fragmentation should instead point to a different diagnosis. It is evident that there is no institution within which the country’s disparate interests can negotiate their differences with real consequences for political decision-making. For now, the United States still enjoys a tacit agreement on core issues such as pursuing economic prosperity, social mobility, and the sense of national and social integrity. But few would point to Congress as a place where important interest groups, like business and labor, hash out and negotiate their interests with reference to the common good. Instead, since lobbying occurs behind the scenes, representatives have little incentive to negotiate among competing interests in public. For the long-term health of the American regime, this lack of a trusted deliberative body is very disturbing.

Of course, pharmaceutical companies operate in the private sector and have the right to pursue mergers and takeovers as a means of securing future growth for their shareholders. Nevertheless, critics argue that an over-reliance on M&A in the pharma industry is ultimately unsustainable because of the damaging effect it has on the industry’s R&D capacity. Business goals must be met, but when it’s at the cost of R&D in a research-intensive industry like pharma, there’s a risk that companies are fuelling growth through the synergies and efficiencies that come with mergers, while reducing what should be their raison d’être – the development of new drugs.

John LaMattina, a former president of global research and development at serial M&A player Pfizer, has been particularly prominent in his criticism of mergers and their affect on pharma research. “A consequence of any merger is the inevitable consolidation of the two companies,” he wrote in a June 2014 editorial for Forbes.

The government doesn’t necessarily need to win cases for lawsuits to have an impact. For starters, big cases against big companies send a message designed to discourage future dealmaking. This is particularly true for today’s most successful technology companies, which have long expanded into emerging markets by gobbling up promising startups already on the field. As ex-Biden competition advisor Tim Wu recently noted, it can make a huge difference to an industry if the major players know they’re “under heavy surveillance from the government.”

Even if deals eventually close, regulators see value in everyone understanding that all transactions will be more closely scrutinized. From the outset, companies will find themselves encouraged to make voluntary concessions. In the Activision deal, for example, Microsoft preemptively offered substantial limits on how it will treat Activision’s products post-merger. Flagship titles including Call of Duty, notably, will not be pulled from other platforms, and offered instead as Xbox exclusives.

There is growing concern that dominant companies use patents strategically to keep competitors from entering their market. This column uses the landmark 1956 Consent Decree against Bell Labs to explore whether antitrust enforcement is an effective remedy to the problem. Results show that patents can indeed be used as an entry barrier for start-up firms, and that the compulsory licensing of patents can foster market entry and innovation. However, compulsory licensing is found to be ineffective in markets where dominant firms have other means of market foreclosure.

Innovation is a key driver of economic growth, and the patent system is one of the main instruments governments use to foster innovation. However, there is growing concern that dominant companies might use patents strategically to deny potential entrants – often small, technology-oriented start-ups – access to key technologies in an attempt to keep out competitors.1 As start-ups are thought to generate more radical innovations than established firms, this practice may harm technological progress and economic growth.

But the effects of such action are highly uncertain. Will a less concentrated tech sector comprised of slightly smaller firms fuel innovation and create openings for a new generation of tech companies? Or will reductions to scale significantly hurt leading tech firms’ ability to leverage the traditional building blocks of AI innovation—like computing power and data—into breakthroughs? The answers to these questions aren’t clear cut but offer a way to begin thinking about how antitrust enforcement could impact artificial intelligence innovation and national security more broadly.

Unlike some earlier national-security technologies, the commercial sector plays an outsize role in AI development. As a result, government access to both AI products and innovation hinges, in large part, on industry. While academia, private research labs, and AI start-ups offer important contributions to AI development, major American technology companies have traditionally led the field. Last year, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple ranked among the ten largest recipients of U.S. artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) patents.

As I explain in The Market Power of Technology, the central challenge for antitrust is that firms with advanced technology build legal market power to extract monopoly profits. While market entry is free (for example, anyone can sell smartphones), an entrant cannot use existing proprietary technology (such as the Apple iPhone). To compete in that market (top-quality smartphones), it must invent new technology and produce a superior product. But that is very difficult, and any attempt will elicit an aggressive response from the incumbent (Apple, Inc.). Consequently, competitive challenges are rare, and market power becomes entrenched.

Antitrust laws and Supreme Court decisions have declared profits from an innovation “innocent” because they result spontaneously, not as a result of intentional action to restrain trade. Not only is the accumulating market power of technology legal and unregulated; it is also supported by patent law, which is thus in conflict with the original aim of antitrust law. The implication is that the FTC can bring suits only against how firms conduct their business, not against their actual monopoly power.

Tech giants have been on an artificial intelligence spending spree, doling out billions of dollars to invest in, poach from, and gobble up smaller companies developing the world’s AI technology.

Amazon has poured $4 billion into AI startup Anthropic to use its tech. Apple purchased Canadian startup DarwinAI earlier this year, adding to a long list of the company’s quiet AI acquisitions. Microsoft made a strange deal to “acqui-hire” the startup Inflection, paying a $650 million “licensing fee” to hire its chief executive Mustafa Suleyman and hire most of its staff.