Technology
NewsOnScale Staff
October 1, 2026
The Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation this week into Microsoft, Google, Amazon, OpenAI, and Anthropic over the multibillion-dollar investment partnerships that now define the AI industry.
The inquiry targets three deals in particular. Microsoft has invested a reported $13 billion in OpenAI, with OpenAI's models powering Microsoft's Copilot products. Amazon invested $4 billion in Anthropic. Google invested $2 billion in the same company. In both cases, Anthropic gave its cloud partners exclusive access to its models. Anthropic runs primarily on Amazon Web Services.
The FTC wants to know whether those arrangements allow dominant companies to exercise undue influence, gain privileged access, and ultimately undermine fair competition in the AI market. Companies have 45 days to respond.
The commission isn't wrong to ask.
What the investigation describes, a small number of well-capitalized companies using investment relationships to lock in access and crowd out independent builders, is the market structure that independent AI companies have been navigating since the beginning. The biggest models run on the biggest clouds. The biggest clouds are invested in the biggest models. The biggest models power the biggest platforms. The cycle is closed.
What it leaves out is everyone who built outside it.
JJ Johnson, a 2028 presidential candidate and founder of AMILLI AI, Corp., built AMilliPay, agent-to-agent payment infrastructure covering 12 verticals, on a $500 laptop with no cloud investment, no hyperscaler partnership, and no exclusive access deal. The product is live. Its trademark is filed with the USPTO. It is built to NIST post-quantum cryptography standards, making it NSA 2035 compliant. Johnson says he shipped the world's first quantum-safe payment rail for the AI agent economy before Visa, Mastercard, or any company at yesterday's White House AI lunch did.
The FTC's concern is that the AI market is being quietly consolidated through investment relationships rather than open competition. A payment rail built with none of those relationships is, by the FTC's own framing, exactly what a competitive market is supposed to produce.
The investigation also raises a question the FTC has not yet asked. The same companies under scrutiny for anti-competitive investment practices also own the platforms where independent AI builders market their products, distribute their tools, and reach customers. Johnson's pending federal complaint, Case No. 1:26-cv-00197-RH-HTC, and his forthcoming second complaint naming Microsoft, Alphabet, Google, and YouTube, allege that those platforms have suppressed his campaign content and his company's reach in ways that mirror the anti-competitive behavior the FTC is now beginning to investigate.
The FTC is asking whether these companies distorted the AI market through investment. The next question is whether they distorted it through distribution.
Nobody has asked that one yet.
NewsOnScale is owned by AMILLI AI, Corp., founded by JJ Johnson.