The UK's competition watchdog is reviewing Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has raised potential market dominance concerns as Microsoft owns 49 per cent of the Artificial Intelligence company.
It comes after the ChatGPT creator hit the headlines over the sudden sacking of co-founder Sam Altman.
He was offered a lead research AI role at Microsoft, before returning to OpenAI.
And the CMA is curious as to whether this seeming merger could be an "acquisition of control".
Sorcha O'Carroll, senior director for mergers at the CMA, said: "The invitation to comment is the first part of the CMA's information gathering process and comes in advance of launching any phase 1 investigation, which would only happen once the CMA has received the information it needs from the partnership parties."
Vice-chair and president of Microsoft Brad Smith claims it only means they "will now have a non-voting observer on OpenAI's board."
He recently denied that AI could be "more powerful" than humans within the next year, insisting it would take "years".
Speaking at a recent event, as quoted by the BBC, he said: "There's absolutely no probability that you're going to see this so-called artificial general intelligence where computers are more powerful than people come in the next 12 months. It's going to take years, if not many decades."
Microsoft invested $13 billion (£10bn) to help launch OpenAI and ChatGPT.
It comes after the CMA investigated Microsoft's acquisition of games developer Activision Blizzard.
The $68.7 billion deal was finalised on October 13, after Microsoft agreed to offer its cloud gaming support for Activision Blizzard's games for 10 years to Ubisoft to appease the CMA.
