Tech Giants' AI Deals Slip Through Merger Law Loopholes

Since late 2023, several high-profile deals between leading AI labs and tech giants have been reviewed by competition authorities in four jurisdictions. Nearly all of them were found to fall outside of merger law.

The issue lies in the fact that merger control was designed to identify control, not partial stakes, compute agreements, or board-adjacent access through which power over frontier AI labs is increasingly being consolidated.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) cleared Microsoft's deals with OpenAI and Mistral, as well as Amazon's partnership with Anthropic. Germany's Federal Cartel Office also concluded that Microsoft-OpenAI's cooperation was not subject to merger control.

However, Brazil's Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) cleared Nvidia-Run:ai, Microsoft-Mistral, and Google-Character.AI mergers on the same grounds in 2026. The EU member states' referral procedure concerning Microsoft's acquisition of certain assets of Inflection was also closed.

The one exception was Brazil's separate order for a merger review of the Microsoft-Inflection deal, invoking a discretionary provision under Article 88(7) of the Competition Law that allows review of transactions falling below the revenue thresholds for mandatory notification.

Regulators have begun to examine these deals more closely, recognizing that AI ecosystems are increasingly shaped by minority investments, long-term compute agreements, and strategic partnerships that may fall short of the legal threshold for merger control individually.