FTC launches inquiry into artificial intelligence deals such as Microsoft's OpenAI partnership

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fascination with AI advancements. As part of the deal, the Redmond, Washington software giant would supply computing power — such as from one of its data centers in rural Iowa — needed to train the AI models on huge troves of human-written texts and other media. In turn, Microsoft would get exclusive to rights to much of what OpenAI built, enabling the technology to be infused into a variety of Microsoft products.

Nadella in January compared it to a number of longstanding Microsoft commercial partnerships, such as with chipmaker Intel. Microsoft and OpenAI "are two different companies, answerable to two sets of different stakeholders with different interests," he told a Bloomberg reporter at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “So we build the compute.

They then use the compute to do the training. We then take that, put it into products. And so in some sense it’s a partnership that is based on each of us really reinforcing what … each other does and then ultimately being competitive in the marketplace." The FTC has signaled for nearly a year that it is working to track and stop illegal behavior in the use and development of AI tools.

Khan said in April that the U.S. government would “not hesitate to crack down" on harmful business practices involving AI. One target of popular concern is the use of AI-generated voices and imagery to turbocharge fraud and phone scams.