The UK’s antitrust regulator will formally investigate Alphabet’s $2.3 billion investment in Anthropic.

The UK competition regulator is investigating Alphabet’s investment in AI startup Anthropic. After opening public comments this summer, the Competition and Market Authority (CMA) said on Thursday it has “enough information” to start a preliminary investigation into whether Alphabet’s reported $2.3 billion investment in Claude AI chatbot maker is harming competition in UK markets.

The CMA breaks its merger investigation into two phases: a first scan to determine if there is enough evidence to dig deeper and a second optional phase where the government gathers as much evidence as possible. After the second stage, we finally decide on the control result.

The investigation will officially begin on Friday. On December 19, the CMA will decide whether to proceed to a phase 2 investigation.

Engadget reached out to Google and the CMA. We will update this story when we hear back.

TechCrunch notes that Alphabet reportedly invested $300 million in Anthropic in early 2023. Later that year, it was said to be supporting AI startups with an additional $2 billion. Situations like this can be classified as “quasi-mergers,” where deep-rooted tech companies take control of emerging startups by investing in hiring founders and tech workers.

Amazon invested heavily in Anthropic: a total of $4 billion. After an initial public comment period, the CMA declined to investigate the investment last month. The CMA said that Amazon avoided Alphabet’s fate at least in part because of its current rules: Anthropic’s UK turnover did not exceed £70 million, and the two parties did not combine to account for 25 percent or more of the region’s supply (in this case, AI LLMs and chatbots).

Although the CMA hasn’t been specific yet, something in Alphabet’s $2.3 billion Anthropic investment has created a deep dive. Of course, Google’s Gemini competes with Claude, and both companies make large language models that they offer to small businesses and enterprise customers.