Antitrust suits are Microsoft’s biggest nightmare. One such suit laid the company low during the late 1980s and 1990s and led to a “lost decade” in which Microsoft became an also-ran in the most important new technologies, including the internet, social media, and mobile computing.
Google, Meta, Apple, and Amazon are all currently embroiled in federal antitrust suits and investigations, while Microsoft has remained — for now — untouched. But the US government is quietly investigating whether Microsoft’s AI, cloud, and productivity suite technologies have been used to violate antitrust laws. OpenAI telling the feds Microsoft violated antitrust laws in their agreement could go a long way towards turning the investigation into an outright prosecution. And in prosecutions, anything can happen, including Microsoft being broken into pieces, even spinning off its AI capabilities.
Microsoft is mulling a nuclear option of its own — it might walk away from negotiations and, in the words of the Financial Times, “rely on its existing commercial contract to retain access to OpenAI’s technology until 2030.” If that were to happen, OpenAI might not be able to go public. That would endanger a $400 billion investment in the company from Softbank and other investors.
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