The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced an informal investigation into Amazon's collaboration with AI startup Adept.

 According to the cooperation agreement announced by Amazon last month, Amazon will hire key executives from Adept and obtain its technology authorization. This investigation highlights the increasing trend of regulatory agencies paying attention to the investment of large technology companies and cooperation with AI companies.

Adept was founded in 2022 and its business includes developing its own AI models, web interactive software, and enterprise agents. In March of this year, Adept announced a Series B financing round. It is reported that the company has received a total of $350 million in financing from Microsoft, Nvidia, and other companies, with a valuation exceeding $1 billion, making it one of the generative AI unicorns. However, Adept has been plagued by product dysfunction, and despite months of testing, it is still difficult to bring any product to market.

The agreement reached by both parties mentions that Amazon plans to hire David Luan, co-founder and CEO of Adept, as the head of its Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team, responsible for Amazon's AGI division, which is composed of many former Adept employees. In addition, Amazon has also obtained authorization for Adept's technology, multimodal models, and some datasets.

Adept stated that the collaboration with Amazon will enable it to focus on building AI agents, as developing its own AI models requires more capital.

The FTC is investigating the impact of AI collaboration and large tech companies. In January of this year, the FTC initiated an extensive study on investment and cooperation in the AI field, requesting detailed information on Microsoft's collaboration with OpenAI, Anthropic's collaboration with Google and Amazon, in order to understand how AI companies' cooperation with big tech companies affects strategies, pricing decisions, product and service acquisition, and personnel decisions.

The FTC is an independent agency in the United States, consisting of five commissioners appointed by the President and approved by the Senate, with each commissioner serving a term of seven years. Its main purpose is to protect consumer rights, prevent fraud, deception, and unfair business practices, while maintaining market competition, preventing monopoly and anti competitive behavior, and ensuring market fairness and transparency.

The responsibilities of the FTC include enforcing consumer protection and antitrust laws, investigating and prosecuting various illegal activities. This also includes collaborating with institutions in other countries to combat transnational fraud and monopolistic behavior.