Benoit Coeuré, president of the Competition Authority, during a press conference in Paris, July 6, 2022 (AFP / Eric PIERMONT)
“Artificial intelligence has the potential to become the museum of antitrust horrors if we do nothing,” Benoit Coeuré, president of the Competition Authority, declared Thursday during a round table on regulation digital event organized in Paris.
“There are reasons to be worried. We risk seeing in this area the whole catalog of anti-competitive practices that we have also seen in digital, that is to say tied selling, bundling, obstacles to access to data, conglomerate effects and self-preference. All this can happen very quickly,” said the boss of the French competition watchdog since January 2022.
“We talk a lot about artificial intelligence between competition authorities. (…) Normally, disruptive innovations are good for competition. But here, there is a risk of capture by players who are already very dominant,” he said during the Digital Alliance Forum.
“To design and deploy artificial intelligence services, you need data and computing power (which) are in the hands of actors, some of whom have a recognized experience of anti-competitive behavior,” he said. for follow-up.
The Competition Authority, which issued an opinion on the cloud sector during the summer, now wishes to delve into “the artificial intelligence value chain”.
In September, she notably carried out a search at Nvidia in Paris, the American giant of graphics cards which traditionally allow you to play video games, but are also essential to the functioning of AI algorithms.
“Another subject that interests the competition authorities is acquisition policies. We have seen the participation of Microsoft in OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT), of Google and AWS in Anthropic, these are minority participations, but the The question arises as to what type of control this can give,” Mr. Coeuré said.
Finally, the cloud and AI are sectors which are evolving very quickly and which for the moment remain outside the scope of the DMA, a new European text which imposes a series of new obligations on certain large platforms, under the control of the European Commission. , he observed.
“Do we want to have a very adaptable DMA at the risk of bad regulation if we go too quickly? Or do we want to continue to give an active role to (national) antitrust, provided that it is itself reactive? This is a major discussion that we will have with the next commission for our strategic choices for the coming years,” declared Mr. Coeuré.