BELLINGHAM, WA – (MyBellinghamNow.com) The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is beginning an anti-trust inquiry into major artificial intelligence (AI) startups and their relations to tech giants.

The FTC announced Thursday it issued compulsory orders to the AI startups OpenAI and Anthropic along with Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Under the orders, the Washington and California-based cloud providers and startups will need to provide details about their partnerships and related financing under the orders. The three corporations have all invested billions of dollars into chatbots and their developers such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.

Concerns over the corporations’ influence on the AI market fueled the inquiry according to the FTC. The money could hold sway over the booming market that produces AI-generated text, imagery and sound.

Google and Microsoft both responded positively to the orders, with Google welcoming the investigation. Amazon, OpenAI and Anthropic declined to comment.

All five companies have 45 days to respond with information containing partnership agreements and related rationale, decisions about product-releases and what resources and services are needed to develop these generative AI systems.