On Friday, the US Department of Justice ended its bid to make Google sell off its stakes in Anthropic.
The government, which won a crucial antitrust ruling against Google's illegal monopoly in its search engine business in August, is still seeking to break up the company, one of the world’s largest firms. But it will now focus on trying to force Google to sell off its web browser Chrome.
In addition to its own in-house AI development, spurred by the 2014 acquisition of the British lab DeepMind, Google has in recent years invested $3 billion in Anthropic, which makes the chatbot Claude. That’s good for a 10% stake in the OpenAI competitor. Anthropic told the judge that losing Google’s investment would hand a strategic advantage to OpenAI and its main investor Microsoft. Google is not the only Silicon Valley investor in the firm; Amazon has also invested $8 billion in the startup.