Why merger law cannot control the ownership structures of frontier AI

Since late 2023, competition authorities in four jurisdictions have reviewed eight deals tying leading global AI labs to a small number of large tech companies, and nearly all were found not to constitute mergers. The UK CMA repeatedly found no relevant merger situation, clearing Microsoft-OpenAI, Mistral, and Amazon-Anthropic in turn, and clearing Microsoft-Inflection at the entity level; Germany's Bundeskartellamt found Microsoft's cooperation with OpenAI not subject to merger control; Brazil's CADE cleared Nvidia-Run:ai, Microsoft-Mistral, and Google-Character.AI on the same grounds in 2026. The only exception is Brazil's separate merger review of Microsoft-Inflection, which invoked the discretionary provision of Article 88(7) of the competition law, holding that the economic substance of the arrangement was equivalent to a conventional acquisition.