(Bloomberg) -- The US Federal Trade Commission has opened an informal inquiry into Amazon.com Inc.’s hiring of senior executives from startup Adept AI Labs Inc., according to people familiar with the probe.
The antitrust agency is already looking into Amazon’s investment in Anthropic, as well as AI investments by Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.
The inquiry is still in its early stages and may not necessarily lead to a full-blown investigation, according to the people, who asked not to be named discussing a confidential probe.
Amazon and the FTC declined to comment.
Last month, the e-commerce giant hired David Luan, Adept’s co-founder and former chief executive officer, for its team working on artificial general intelligence, an advanced version of AI that can think like a human. Four other co-founders and an unspecified number of other team members also moved to Amazon.
The startup said in a blog post that it is focusing on developing agents that help corporate workers perform certain tasks rather than more general-purpose AI tools.
Adept raised $350 million at a valuation of at least $1 billion in March of last year from investors including General Catalyst and Spark Capital, Forbes previously reported.
Amazon plans to license Adept’s technology developing agents — AI tools that can perform tasks autonomously, Bloomberg previously reported.
Reuters earlier reported on the inquiry.
--With assistance from Shirin Ghaffary.
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