Google which has been facing the possibility of a forced breakup of the company has obtained a partial reprieve after the US Justice Department said that the company can maintain its existing investments in AI startups such as Anthropic, but would still need to sell its Chrome web browser.
The Justice Department’s filing in a court last week said that although Google could keep its existing AI investments, it would be required to notify antitrust enforcers before it undertakes any further investments into AI companies.
Google has around A$4.75 billion worth of investment into Anthropic, with the AI startup saying recently that forcing Google to sell its stake would harm competition.
Antitrust enforcers said that banning Google from investments in AI could “cause unintended consequences in the evolving AI space,” reported Bloomberg.
The government continues “to be concerned about Google’s potential to use its sizable capital to exercise influence in AI companies,” the Justice Department said, and suggested Google give notice on investments “to permit a review of proposed transactions.”
The Justice Department’s decision to not change the demand of the previous administration that Google sell Chrome comes as the DoJ argued last year that selling Chrome “will permanently stop Google’s control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet.”
Last year, a US federal judge ruled that Google had illegally monopolised the search market.
Judge Amit Mehta found that the billions Google pays to other companies including the likes of Apple and Samsung to make its search engine the default option on smartphones and web browsers effectively blocks competitors from succeeding in the market.
In an attempt to prevent the breakup of the company, representatives of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, also met with President Donald Trump’s Justice Department recently to get the government to back away from forcing a breakup of Google.
Google is now expected to file its own proposal for its final set of alternative remedies.