Beware: AI antitrust cases ahead

Picture a row of dominoes, each one perfectly positioned and waiting for the inevitable push. That's exactly what's happening in Silicon Valley today, except these aren't children's toys; they are billion-dollar AI partnerships that could bring down tech's most powerful empires. The domino effect, a chain reaction where one event triggers a cascade of similar events, is manifesting itself in ways that would make even the most seasoned antitrust lawyers nervous.

Just as a U.S. judge ruled that Google violated antitrust law, spending billions of dollars to create an illegal monopoly and become the world's default search engine, we are witnessing the early tremors of what could become the most significant antitrust reckoning in tech history. But this time, it's not just about search engines or social media platforms; it's about artificial intelligence.

The domino effect in the AI space works like this: tech giants, already under intense regulatory scrutiny, are doubling down on AI partnerships and investments that appear innovative on the surface but potentially create new monopolistic structures underneath. These partnerships, while promising technological breakthroughs, are setting up a chain reaction of concerns that regulators are already beginning to knock down, one by one.

How AI partnerships mask market domination

When Microsoft poured $13 billion into OpenAI, it wasn't just about investing; it was executing a strategic market positioning. The partnership gives Microsoft a 49% stake in the company behind ChatGPT, but more importantly, it creates what competition experts are calling a "reverse killer acquisition" in disguise.

The playbook is deceptively simple yet effective. Amazon has invested approximately $4 billion in Anthropic, making AWS the startup's primary cloud provider. It has ensured that Anthropic uses the company's specialised AI chips for future development. Google, not to be outdone, has pumped $2 billion into the same company while simultaneously developing its own competing AI system, Gemini. The result? A web of interconnected dependencies that makes true competition nearly impossible.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission opened a broad antitrust investigation into Microsoft, recognising that these partnerships create six distinct types of competitive harm. The first and most obvious is the elimination of competing products. Imagine Microsoft deciding that one of OpenAI's innovations competes too closely with its own offerings and simply killing the project. The second threat involves slowing down the development of potentially disruptive technologies, allowing established players to maintain their dominance while appearing to foster innovation.

What makes this concerning is the sophisticated nature of the suppression. Microsoft has already hired away key employees from Inflection AI, including the company's co-founder, CEO, chief scientist, and several senior engineers. The Wall Street Journal reports that such deals are becoming commonplace, with industry insiders calling them "acquisitions in everything but name." This brain drain doesn't just weaken potential competitors; it actively dismantles them while maintaining plausible deniability.

The FTC's investigation, launched in January 2024, required Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI to provide detailed information about their AI investments and partnerships. Chair Lina Khan warned that "dominant companies risk distorting innovation and undermining fair competition". 

Current cases signal bigger battles ahead

The dominoes are already falling. On April 17, 2025, a District Judge in Virginia ruled that Google established and maintained its monopoly power by engaging in anticompetitive practices, with the Justice Department declaring that "Google is a monopolist and has abused its monopoly power". This ruling is just the beginning of what promises to be a wave of antitrust enforcement against Big Tech.

The current legal landscape reads like a prosecutor's wish list. Google faces multiple ongoing cases: one for monopolising search services and search text advertising (already in the government's favour), another alleging monopolisation of digital advertising markets (again, ruled that Google violated antitrust laws), and additional investigations into its AI partnerships with Anthropic. Meta is among the companies facing an antitrust case over its acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, while Apple confronts accusations of monopolising smartphone markets through restrictive hardware and software practices.

Amazon isn't escaping scrutiny either, with the FTC suing the company for monopolising segments of the online marketplace while simultaneously investigating its AI partnerships. The scope of these investigations reveals a coordinated effort by regulators to address the systemic abuse of market power across multiple sectors simultaneously.

What's striking is how these traditional antitrust cases are intersecting with AI-specific concerns. The DOJ and FTC have agreed on a division of labour for AI investigations, with the DOJ focusing on Nvidia's dominance in AI chips while the FTC examines the partnerships between tech giants and AI startups. 

Apple was fined over 500 million euros ($570 million) and Meta over 200 million euros, as European Union antitrust regulators handed out the first sanctions under landmark legislation aimed at curbing the power of Big Tech. These fines, while significant, pale in comparison to the potential remedies being considered in ongoing cases, which could include forced breakups of tech companies.

This adds another layer of complexity. Four antitrust enforcers across two continents: the European Commission, the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, the DOJ, and the FTC, have issued a joint statement expressing concerns about AI partnerships. Regulators globally are recognising the existential threat these alliances pose to competitive markets.

Why AI makes everything worse

The AI revolution has created the perfect conditions for antitrust enforcement to accelerate beyond anything we have seen before. Unlike previous technology waves, AI requires massive computational resources, enormous datasets, and specialised talent. These are resources that existing tech giants already control in abundance. This creates what economists call "network effects" and "platform effects" that can quickly bring market dominance.

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has noted that AI markets face particular risks because they require access to key inputs like computing power, data, and engineering talent. When a handful of companies control these essential resources, they can determine which AI innovations see the light of day and which disappear into vaults.

The algorithmic nature of AI introduces entirely new categories of potential antitrust violations. Pricing algorithms can facilitate collusion without explicit communication between companies. We can see this in cases where companies used automatic repricing software to maintain price-fixing cartels. The complexity increases exponentially when these algorithms begin learning and adapting independently, raising questions about corporate liability for anti-competitive behaviour.

European regulators have taken a particularly aggressive stance, with EU Commissioner Margarethe Vestager warning about "barriers to entry everywhere" in AI markets. The EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act have attempted to regulate AI applications before competitive harms become entrenched, rather than trying to unwind monopolistic structures after they have formed.

The concern extends beyond traditional market metrics. AI partnerships create what reports call "vertical foreclosure" risks, where dominant companies can use their AI partnerships to disadvantage competitors in adjacent markets. Imagine Amazon leveraging its Anthropic partnership to deny superior AI capabilities to emerging competitors in cloud services, effectively using AI as a weapon to maintain dominance.

Perhaps most troubling is the "monopsony" effect, a market situation in which there is only one buyer. When the largest tech companies coordinate through AI partnerships, they gain collective bargaining power over the highly specialised engineers and researchers who develop these technologies. This concentration of hiring power can suppress wages and working conditions while limiting the talent available to potential competitors.

The regulatory response, however, is evolving rapidly, with the UK's Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act granting the CMA new powers to intervene proactively in digital markets. The CMA can now designate companies with "strategic market status" and impose specific conduct requirements.

What makes this moment particularly dangerous for tech giants is the multiple regulatory pressures. Traditional antitrust cases are proceeding alongside AI-specific investigations, while new ex-ante regulatory frameworks create additional compliance burdens. Companies that might have weathered individual challenges now face sustained attacks across multiple fronts simultaneously.

The ultimate irony is that tech giants' attempts to secure their dominance through AI partnerships may prove to be the very strategy that brings about their downfall — the beginning of their end. By creating such obvious concentrations of market power, these companies have given regulators the ammunition they need to justify interventions. The dominoes are falling, and there's no stopping it now.

The question isn't whether more antitrust cases are coming; it's how many companies will still be standing when the dust settles. In trying to secure their AI futures, Big Tech may have inadvertently sealed its antitrust fate.