The U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission are discussing which agency can probe OpenAI on antitrust grounds — including the AI firm's partnership with Microsoft — Politico reported on Friday, citing three people with knowledge of the matter.
Microsoft's tie-up with the ChatGPT maker has raised antitrust scrutiny after the U.S. software giant committed to invest more than $10 billion into OpenAI last year.
Earlier this month, EU antitrust regulators flagged that Microsoft's investment in OpenAI might be reviewable under European Union merger rules after a similar warning was placed by Britain's antitrust regulator in December.
The FTC initiated talks with the DOJ months ago to figure out which agency can review the matter, but neither is ready to give up jurisdiction, the report said.
The talks are mostly limited to Microsoft and OpenAI and are not part of a broader dialog over which agency will investigate artificial intelligence issues, according to the report.
Microsoft declined to comment on the matter when contacted by Reuters.
A separate interagency debate started more recently over who can investigate these companies for allegedly illegally scraping content from websites to train their AI models, the report added.
