The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has asked Amazon for more details about its deal with the AI startup Adept regarding hiring executives and researchers.

The FTC has been investigating deals created through AI partnerships that have been prominent in recent months.

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FTC Questions Transition of Adept Employees to Amazon

Last month, Adept chief executive David Luan and other employees announced they were leaving the company to join Amazon. The latter has already shared that it would license some of the startup's technology.

Amazon has been working to catch up on the AI race against other tech giants. The company recently established its new organization, the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team.

Luan is now leading the AGI "autonomy" team, which involves many former Adept employees. The team is directly reporting to the head of the AGI team, Rohit Prasad.

FTC Investigates Deals Between Tech Giants, AI Startups

Adept, a fairly new company in the AI industry, was founded in 2022. The startup had a good start by raising more than $400 million from venture capital investors.

The company reached a total valuation of over $1 billion, enough to release some open-source models. However, Adept failed to reach a commercial success. Amazon and Adept have yet to clarify the settlement terms it reached.

The FTC is currently eyeing similar deals as other companies have taken the same route. For instance, Microsoft is under investigation for hiring employees from Inflection AI.

Amazon has also successfully invested in an AI startup before. The company gave $4 billion to Anthropic last September in exchange for a minority stake in the AI company.

The FTC is now looking at the specific terms of such deals. Companies could face scrutiny from the agency once there is evidence of a merger disclosure.

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