Amazon acquires Adept, setting a "standard mode" for AI transactions in Silicon Valley

With policies from above and countermeasures from below, in order to avoid antitrust scrutiny, AI giants have developed a new type of merger and acquisition model.

Last week, Amazon poached core talents from Adept, a potential competitor of OpenAI and reached a technology licensing agreement with the startup.

Amazon has hired the founder of Adept to join their team, and has also employed nearly 66% of Adept's employees. Rohit Prasad, Senior Vice President of Amazon, stated that similar to Microsoft's acquisition of Inflection, Amazon will also license Adept's technology to "accelerate our roadmap to build digital agents and automate software workflows."

Adept, operated by former developers from OpenAI and Google AI, has raised approximately $400 million from top U.S. investors.

It is worth noting that Amazon did not directly acquire Adept, which is reminiscent of Microsoft's collaboration with the startup InflectionAI. In March this year, the founder and core team members of InflectionAI were also "packaged" by Microsoft, joining the new department MicrosoftAI, and the two companies also signed a technology licensing agreement.

"Poaching talent, licensing technology" seems to be becoming a new model for large U.S. tech companies to expand their artificial intelligence territory. The U.S. tech media The Verge refers to this model as "reverse acquisition." The practices of Microsoft and Amazon are new strategies for large tech companies to layout AI and evade regulation.

In the past Silicon Valley, the common practice for tech giants to quickly fill their "shortcomings" was to directly acquire small companies in related fields, poach team members, and then the fate of the small company was to "wait to die." However, in recent years, the direct acquisition model has often triggered antitrust scrutiny by regulatory agencies.

More and more tech giants are controlling AI products, technologies, or core personnel through investment in AI startups, establishing strategic partnerships, and hiring teams, while also avoiding restrictions from antitrust regulations due to excessive control.

Currently, large tech companies like Microsoft are facing strict antitrust scrutiny. In January this year, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission announced an investigation into the $13 billion cooperation between Microsoft and OpenAI. Due to concerns from the U.S. government about power concentration in the artificial intelligence market, if Microsoft were to directly acquire Inflection, it may face regulatory challenges.

The Verge stated that the current antitrust enforcement mechanism in the U.S. will definitely try to prevent Amazon's acquisition of Adept, regardless of whether there is a strong legal basis for doing so. Therefore, Amazon has also chosen a path similar to Microsoft's.

LinkedIn co-founder and American entrepreneur Reid Hoffman recently predicted that "Microsoft's collaboration with Inflection will become a new model for future AI transactions, and what we are seeing now is this model."