Tech World

Trump isn’t backing down from Big Tech fights — but is willing to bend on AI

President Trump’s antitrust enforcers are not backing down from legal fights with Big Tech, even as the administration signals a willingness to take a lighter touch with artificial intelligence.

The administration is pressing ahead with two antitrust lawsuits already taken to trial against Google (GGOG, GOOGL) and prepping for new antitrust trials against Meta (META), Amazon (AMZN), and Apple (APPL).

Trump officials at the Federal Trade Commission are also broadening a probe into Microsoft (MSFT) and its relationship with AI upstart OpenAI while challenging Microsoft’s acquisition of gaming giant Activision Blizzard.

“This isn’t the Bush administration,” Trump’s FTC chair Andrew Ferguson told a group of American CEOs on Tuesday in Washington, D.C., referring to one of the weakest US antitrust enforcement periods in modern history.

Andrew Ferguson of the Federal Trade Commission. (Reuters/Sophie Park) · REUTERS / Reuters

But Trump is also showing he may take a lighter approach to AI as the US competes with China for world supremacy in that ascendant technology.

In a March 7 filing, Trump’s Justice Department argued to a judge that Google should be able to keep its AI investments in companies such as Anthropic even if other parts of its empire are broken up.

“The DOJ action is not just a signal on how the President will treat AI, it is a reaction to, and clear response to, the policy of the president and vice-president,” said JD Harriman, former outside patent counsel for Steve Jobs at Apple and a partner with Foundation Law Group.

Boston College Law professor David Olson agreed that the DOJ’s decision not to interfere with Google’s AI ambitions is evidence of a shift from the Biden era.

“Just from a policy standpoint, I think that it’s telling that they might be walking back [AI remedies], specifically,” Olson said. “Of all of the things they could have walked back, that was the one they decided.”

The tech world is trying to determine how aggressive Trump’s antitrust enforcers will be following four years of a Biden administration marked by legal fights with many of Silicon Valley’s biggest names.

Trump FTC boss Ferguson made it clear in his speech that his agency wouldn’t be backing down. The FTC, he said, would challenge mergers it suspects would harm Americans economically but leave the rest alone.

To that end, the FTC told a judge this week that it was ready to start a trial against Amazon in September.

The FTC also plans to widen its investigation into Microsoft, according to Bloomberg. The probe was first launched by Biden FTC Chair Lina Khan, a key architect of a new movement seeking to expand the legal theories that can give rise to antitrust claims.



Source link

Related Articles

Back to top button

Adblock Detected