(Bloomberg) -- Artificial Intelligence will intensify competition abuses by Big Tech, according to Andreas Mundt, the top German antitrust official who’s spearheaded efforts to rein in Silicon Valley.

AI systems will become a closed shop and users won’t be able to escape to look for alternatives, Mundt warned at the annual press conference of his agency, the Federal Cartel Office. He said that together with their counterparts in countries like France or the European Union, German regulators are now looking at how to tackle the nightmare.   

AI is a “first-class fire accelerator” for anti-competitive tactics and “will make all the problems only worse,” Mundt said. “There’s a great danger that we’ll will get an even deeper concentration of digital markets and power increase at various levels, from chips to the front end” where tech interacts with users.

While Mundt namechecked Nvidia Corp., maker of the gold standard graphics chip for training AI models, he didn’t indicate that the company was a specific target and he said his office hasn’t yet opened a AI-specific probe. 

However, his concerns play a role in the pending probe on whether the Federal Cartel Office will put Microsoft Corp. under heightened scrutiny, he said. 

The authority has seven digital-market probes against tech firms pending. Their power is the number one issue for competition authorities worldwide, Mundt said.

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