The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reportedly started an informal inquiry into Amazon’s hiring of senior executives from start-up Adept AI Labs last month.

Reuters reported the FTC is asking questions about Amazon hiring Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan alongside additional employees for its artificial general intelligence division.

Last month, Adept announced Amazon was licencing its agent technology, family of multimodal models and several datasets.

The news site noted informal inquiries do not always result in an official investigation or enforcement action.

According to Amazon, Adept had decided to move the company in a different direction prior to becoming involved with the tech giant.

Adept employees who worked on foundation models and wanted to continue to work on them made the decision to accept offers of employment, according to Amazon.

A representative from the FTC declined to comment on the informal inquiry.

Big tech scrutiny
Regulatory bodies are increasingly taking a hard look at partnerships between big tech companies and prominent AI startups.

The European Commission (EC) said it would monitor ‘acqui-hires’ where a company takes over another mainly for its employees, citing Microsoft and Inflection AI as a primary example. It has also started queries into Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI and Google’s deal to install generative AI capabilities into Samsung devices.

Elsewhere, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened a formal investigation into Microsoft over its move to hire engineers and researchers from Inflection AI for its AI consumer group.