U.S. Senators Urge Review of Antitrust Risks in Tech Giants' AI Deals

Odaily News U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, and Richard Blumenthal have called on federal agencies to review whether Nvidia, Meta, and Google's artificial intelligence deals involve potential antitrust violations. The three Democratic senators sent a letter to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice on Wednesday, urging the relevant agencies to examine a series of recent transactions. In these deals, tech companies paid to "poach" specific employees from startups without acquiring the companies outright. The senators described such transactions as "reverse merger-style poaching." The letter stated that these deals "function as de facto mergers in substance, allowing the involved companies to consolidate talent, information, and resources, while apparently attempting to evade the regulatory scrutiny typically applied to merger and acquisition transactions." The FTC and the DOJ should "conduct rigorous reviews of these transactions and, if they violate antitrust laws, block or unwind them." (Jin10)