AI a ‘fire accelerator’ for Big Tech antitrust abuses, Germany’s competition chief warns

The rise of advanced artificial intelligence tools will act as “first-class fire accelerator” for anticompetitive behavior by Big Tech firms, Germany’s top antitrust official warned Wednesday.

The warning from Andreas Mundt, head of Germany’s Federal Cartel Office, comes as AI leaders such as Microsoft, Google and Nvidia face mounting scrutiny from watchdogs in the US and the European Union over concerns that they wield too much power over the market.

Powerful AI systems “will make all the problems only worse,” according to Mundt, who cited fears that users won’t be able to avoid Big Tech platforms in favor of alternative services.

“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 users interact with tech platforms, Mundt said at his agency’s annual press conference, according to Bloomberg.

Mundt reportedly pointed during his remarks to Nvidia – a major supplier of chips used to train AI models that briefly became the world’s most valuable company last week.

However, he said Germany’s antitrust cops have yet to launch an AI-centric probe.