FTC is pursuing antitrust regulation over AI monopolies now.

As it examines artificial intelligence, the Federal Trade Commission will seek to ensure these quickly emerging technologies do not close markets or feed into existing monopoly powers, FTC Chair Lina Khan said Wednesday at an international regulatory session in Brussels. “There’s no doubt that these tools could provide enormous opportunity that could really catalyze growth and innovation,” Khan said at the “Antitrust, Regulation and the Next World Order” conference hosted by the Capitol Forum. “But historically, we’ve seen that these moments of technological inflection points and disruption can either open up markets, or they can be used to close off markets and double down on existing monopoly power.” The FTC is “taking a holistic approach across the AI,” Khan added. “We’ve been very fortunate to build up a team of technologists in-house that can help us look under the hood,” she said. “So we’ve been going layer by layer from chips and cloud and compute to the foundation models to the applications to understand what are the key economic properties here.” President Joe Biden has called on the FTC and other federal agencies to address the quickly emerging technology. “It’s a moment of diagnosis and wanting to make sure that our analysis and understanding across the stack … is accurate so that we can then be using any policy or enforcement tools as appropriate to try to get ahead where we can or at least not be decades and decades behind,” Khan said. The FTC last week ordered five companies to provide the agency with information on recent investments and partnerships involving generative artificial intelligence and major cloud service providers. The agency issued the order under its investigative authority in Section 6(b) of the Federal Trade Commission Act. The companies are Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Anthropic PBC, Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI Inc.