The new M1-powered MacBook Air is hilariously fast, and the battery lasts a long-ass time.
If you stop reading this review immediately after this, then know that unless Windows virtualization is a requirement of your workflow, you should probably just go ahead and sell your old MacBook Air immediately and get this thing instead.
Assuming you’ve got a grand or so lying around that you weren’t going to spend on something else. But hey, if you do, then I can confidently tell you that in spite of what a legion of Doubting Thomases (including me!) might have said about Apple’s freshman effort at its own PC silicon, it is now my studied opinion that there are far, far stupider ways to part with your cash.
(Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.)
Apple provided Ars with a couple of M1 Mac Minis for review. One of those went to Samuel for him to write up, and the other went to Jim for him to do his silicon analysis. Apple declined our request for any model of M1-powered laptop.
The MacBook Air being reviewed here is my personal device, which I bought shortly after the unveiling event. I’ve written this as quickly as possible after receiving it, but I had to wait for the device, which is why you all had to wait for the review. (This is also why it’s in kind of an intermediate configuration, rather than stock or maxed out like most review devices—I bumped the RAM up to 16GB and the internal storage up to 1TB, because that’s what I wanted.)
Because this is my device, I’m coming into this review from a slightly different perspective than some of the other publications doing MBA reviews. I’m not going to tell you why you should buy a MacBook Air, or how it might work for you. But I am going to talk about what it has been like to own it for a few days and how the device fits into my life. I do most of my power-user stuff on the desktop rather than on a portable, but I do occasionally need to leave the office and hit the road—and the M1 MBA is going to be a great traveling companion. You know, once we can hit the road again without worrying about plagues and stuff.
Specs at a glance: 2020 MacBook Air (M1)
Screen
2560×1600 at 13.3 inches
OS
macOS Big Sur 11.0.1
CPU
Apple M1
RAM
16GB
GPU
Apple M1 (8 core)
HDD
1TB SSD
Networking
802.11ax Wi-Fi 6; IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac; Bluetooth 5.0
Ports
2x Thunderbolt 3/USB 3.1 Gen 2/DisplayPort, 3.5mm headphone
Approaching a device like this as a reviewer is different from approaching a device as a consumer. When the UPS guy drops it off, you can’t just rip the box open and jump in—there’s stuff you have to do first.
Tripods. Lights. Gotta iron the big white sweep cloth so I’ve got a background for pix. Gotta try to remember where the DSLR battery is.
It’s the oddest part about working for Ars, even after going on eight years. Your technology buying experiences are not always your own—sometimes the Ars readership comes along for the ride.
So after unboxing, I logged on and ran some benchmarks. That’s the first thing you have to do when you’re reviewing—you either do the benchmarks first, or you do them dead last, and I wanted to get them out of the way because this was, you know, my laptop, and I’d actually like to use it for stuff rather than having it be tied up running battery tests for 20 hours at a time.
This is the box that it comes in.
Lee Hutchinson
This is everything that’s inside the box. (Well, almost everything—you get an actual laptop, too.)
Lee Hutchinson
2015 13-inch i7-powered MacBook Air at left, 2020 13-inch M1-powered MacBook Air at right.
Lee Hutchinson
The older MacBook Air design is a little bulkier, even though the screens are the same size.
Lee Hutchinson
A tale of two laptops.
Lee Hutchinson
Out with the old, in with the new. (If anyone wants to grab a copy of the awesome Last Starfighter wallpaper on the old MBA, I got it from this reddit thread.
Lee Hutchinson
Only a few days earlier, I had used my living room HTPC—a base-config 2018 Mac mini—to do the entire set of Mac comparison benchmarks for Samuel’s Mac mini review. I had a pretty good feel for how quickly the Intel mini’s hex-core i5 banged through each of the tests, since I’d just seen the numbers, and from talking to Samuel and Jim I was anticipating the new MBA’s M1 would beat the Intel-powered mini.
I just didn’t realize how hard a beatdown it would be.
Getting the benchmarky bits out of the way
So here’s how fast it is in a bunch of charts and graphs.
According to Apple, the MacBook Air’s M1 is voltage-limited in order to function within the fanless design’s thermal envelope. iFixit’s teardown shows in detail that the Air’s M1 cooling setup is an entirely passive affair, with just a heat transfer plate in between the M1 CPU and the aluminum body. I was expecting performance similar to but perhaps a bit lower than the M1-powered Mac mini, and that’s more or less what I got. However, the Air’s M1 is good for at least a few solid minutes of full-bore Firestorm core performance before it throttles back.
<a href="https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/MBA_M1_2020_49_v1-scaled-1.jpg" class="enlarge" data-height="1920" data-width="2560" alt="The M1 MBA's passive cooling setup, disassembled over at iFixit.”><img alt="The M1 MBA's passive cooling setup, disassembled over at iFixit.” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/MBA_M1_2020_49_v1-scaled-1-640×480.jpg” width=”640″ height=”480″ srcset=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/MBA_M1_2020_49_v1-scaled-1-1280×960.jpg 2x”>
In benchmarking, I noticed that subsequent runs of the Final Cut Pro export would slow down dramatically—the first export would complete in about 1 minute and 19 seconds, but if I immediately repeated the export it would take a bit under 2.5 minutes—and the Air would be quite warm to the touch. After closing the lid to hibernate until the Air was cool and then repeating the export, the time was once again in the 1:20-ish range.
To create some more sustained load, I cloned the source video three times and then repeated the export process. Starting from a cold startup with the MBA’s chassis at ambient temperature gave a result of 4 minutes, 21 seconds. This time, I opened Activity Monitor’s CPU graph to spy on the core utilization. All eight cores were engaged until about 2:56, at which time half of the cores—presumably the high-performance Firestorm cores—dropped to less than 50-percent usage and stayed there until the run completed.
Starting a long export with all four cores blazing away.
But after a few minutes, four of the cores—presumably the high-performance Firestorm ones—throttle themselves back.
A second run immediately after that took 7:37—not quite twice as long, but heading in that direction. Activity Monitor’s CPU usage graph showed half of the cores (presumably the high-performance Firestorm cores) at half utilization for the entire run.
Further testing—including several runs after letting the MBA sit powered off for about an hour to make absolutely sure it was cooled to ambient—failed to produce anything resembling a precise, repeatable time interval for when throttling starts. The best I can do is to say that it seems that when you throw a heavy workload at the MBA, it runs at full-bore until the Firestorm cores become too toasty, which seems to take anywhere from 3-ish to 6-ish minutes. Then it backs the Firestorm cores off until they show about 50-percent utilization, and the amount of heat generated at that level seems to be within the sustained thermal capacity of the design.
(These are subjective measurements, taken in whatever indoor ambient conditions happened to be happening in my house as I was doing the testing. Your results may vary.)
I hate USB-C charging, give me back MagSafe
The other major thing for a portable like the MBA is battery life, and we’re going to talk about that. But first, very briefly, the loss of MagSafe sucks.
Yes, I know I’m late to the discussion. I know MagSafe was deleted a few hardware revisions ago, but I’m going from a MacBook Air with it to a MacBook Air without it, and plugging in a USB-C cable feels like going back to the freaking dark ages. I’ve been happy with MagSafe plugs on my laptops for almost an entire decade—that quick one-handed snick into place, that easy no-fuss pull to disengage, and that friendly LED to tell you when you’re all charged up.
Gone but not forgotten. I miss these so damn much.
Jacqui Cheng
Having to shove a connector into a high-friction plug—often requiring two hands, depending on how you’re holding stuff—is stupid. It’s just stupid. This is a customer-hostile regression in functionality. I’m sure there are excellent reasons for it and that it saves Apple money on the MBA’s bill of materials and on warranty support, but I hate it and it’s terrible. This is not the premium Apple experience I feel like I’m paying for.
Battery life
I used the M1 MacBook Air for work all day one day, filling up about 11 hours of on-the-clock time with Slack, emailing, Zoom conferencing, Messages, and Web browsing, and the Air still had 40 percent remaining on the battery meter when the day was done. This is considerably longer than my old 2015 MBA, which throws in the towel around hour five. (Unlike with the official battery test, my unofficial workday usage test was done with adaptive brightness and Night Shift enabled, and there was a fair amount of idling.)
In the official Ars battery test, with the screen locked at our reference brightness of 200 nits, the M1 MBA lasted for 877 minutes—a bit over 14.5 hours. Charge time back from almost dead to full took a bit over two hours with the included 30W adapter, with the device powered off during the charge.
But I don’t usually spend the day working on my laptop—instead, the place where my old MBA most often lets me down is on long flights. Living in Houston means I usually fly United, and United is particularly miserly with power plugs—if you don’t get certain specific seats, you’re out of luck. In my experience, my Intel MBA is good for three, maybe four hours of movie watching before it’s dead as a doornail—so if I’m flying to California or pretty much anywhere that’s more than a couple of hours away and I don’t get a power outlet seat, I know I probably need to bring a book.
The M1 Air laughs at my old MBA. It laughs at it, gives it noogies, and flushes its head down the toilet in the locker room.
<a href="https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/m1mba-mib.jpg" class="enlarge" data-height="2880" data-width="5120" alt="Artist's impression of how I felt about the M1 MacBook Air's battery life as it continued to play Westworld episodes without running out of juice.”><img alt="Artist's impression of how I felt about the M1 MacBook Air's battery life as it continued to play Westworld episodes without running out of juice.” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/m1mba-mib-640×360.jpg” width=”640″ height=”360″ srcset=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/m1mba-mib-1280×720.jpg 2x”>
Enlarge/ Artist’s impression of how I felt about the M1 MacBook Air’s battery life as it continued to play Westworld episodes without running out of juice.
I left the M1 MBA playing 4K Westworld episodes from the UHD BluRay box set, full screen and at max brightness, with the sound blaring at max volume. I finally gave up and shut the laptop off after ten hours, at which point it still said it had 13-percent battery remaining. That’s not only long enough to last out any domestic flight—that’s enough to last you an international flight from the US to Europe.
A quick note on resuming from sleep: during the Air’s reveal, Apple showed off how quickly the Air resumes from standby by having Senior VP Craig Federighi lift the lid of a sleeping MacBook Air and peek in, all set to the mellow sounds of Barry White. While I can’t say that Barry White plays when I open up my laptop, I can say that the M1 Air wakes from sleep very quickly. It’s not that it’s faster than my Intel-powered Air, since the 2015 model will sometimes wake up instantly, too—but the 2015 Air also sometimes takes a second or two to blink on when I lift the lid. The M1 Air is much more consistent—I’ve only had the thing for a few days, but every wake-from-sleep has been lightning quick.
New silicon, old apps
As has been explained by folks who are smarter than I am, the new M1 does not natively run x86 applications. Therefore, as with the last big architecture transition, Apple has created a bytecode translator that can make your Intel applications work on Apple Silicon. It’s called Rosetta 2, and it works pretty well.
The first time you run an x86 application, you’ll be prompted to download Rosetta 2; after that, launching an x86 application is just like launching an Apple Silicon app—you click on it and it runs.
Enlarge/ Apple Silicon-native applications show up in Activity Monitor as “Apple” architecture, while x86 applications are listed as “Intel.”
My laptop workflow doesn’t use many apps, but I am a long-term Firefox user—and unfortunately, the x86 version of Firefox seemed to exhibit a bit of stage fright. Specifically, after installation and startup, Firefox 83 would work fine for the first couple of webpages, and then just… stop loading stuff. It would sit with the “Waiting for…” notice in the status bar, like it was going to load the page, and never get to the next step. Trying to quit the browser would lead to the Firefox process going unresponsive. After killing and relaunching it, the browser would work fine again for a couple of pages and then do the same thing.
Rather than troubleshoot, I fixed the issue by downloading the beta release of Firefox 84, which includes native Apple Silicon support. The problem behavior vanished, and everything worked fine.
The other Intel apps I tried, including Slack, 1Password 7, Dropbox, and a 64-bit community port of Boxer, all worked transparently and without issue. (There were also no problems using 1Password’s extension inside of Firefox, Chrome, or Safari.) Running old Sierra games under Boxer worked fine—and, if I’m being honest, running old Sierra games under Boxer is about half of what I actually do use my laptop for, so this was great news.
Enlarge/ As long as I can still emulate old DOS games, all will be right with the world.
As for running iOS apps on the MBA, I understand it’s notionally possible, but I didn’t bother. Samuel tried it and had mixed luck, and other reviewers at other sites seem to be having about the same experience. I’m not a mobile app kind of guy, and I only have four that I use regularly—Duo for two-factor authentication, Philips’ Hue app for light control, Golf on Mars for wasting time, and 1Password. (Seriously, my phone home screen is two pages, and the only thing on the second page is a folder labeled “Crap” with all the stuff in it that I don’t want on the first page and can’t delete.)
I have no idea how well Apple Silicon on Big Sur runs iOS apps, and I don’t care. For folks wanting to go down that particular path, Samuel’s review has you covered—and since there’s essentially zero functional difference between how the M1 Air runs iOS apps versus the M1 mini, I anticipate the Air would behave identically to the mini.
Form factor, ports, keyboard, screen
Other than the guts, the M1 MacBook Air is pretty much the same device as it is when you buy the Intel-flavored version. The form factor is unchanged. The Air’s Retina-resolution screen is the same as it was before the M1 transition—crisp and sharp enough to cut glass. Off-angle viewing looks as good as you would expect it to look, and we measured its maximum brightness at 409 nits. Backlight coverage to my eyes looks even, and I don’t see any bleeding at the edges.
Leaving the display behind and turning to the rest of the chassis, the Air’s port situation is also the same—the two USB-C plugs support Thunderbolt 3 and USB 3.1 Gen2, and you can connect a single external DisplayPort display that goes up to 6k resolution at 60Hz. Hell, there’s even a headphone jack. That’s just downright courageous.
M1 MacBook Air on top, 2015 Intel MacBook Air on the bottom.
Lee Hutchinson
I’m really going to miss that SD card reader, too. One more adapter I have to carry.
Lee Hutchinson
I missed out on the butterfly keyboard debacle, though I got to experience it vicariously through my Ars coworkers as one by one they all complained in Slack about having to have their butterfly keyboards replaced by Apple. The M1 MBA’s “Magic Keyboard” feels more or less the same as my 2015 MBA—perhaps a bit less mushy, but only a small bit. It’s perfectly serviceable and unremarkable.
Something I greatly dislike, though, is the removal of the keyboard backlight adjustment keys—they have been replaced by a “start dictation” key and a key that toggles “Do Not Disturb” mode on and off. I’m sure that decision was made after a lot of focus group testing to justify it, but man, it’s just powerful annoying to have something you find useful snatched away from you. I find one-touch access to the keyboard backlight to be handy, and I adjust the backlight often. Now the only way to do it is in System Preferences or via a menubar widget. Lame.
Let’s back up a bit before we wrap, because I don’t want to end the review on a down note. Yeah, USB-C charging sucks compared to MagSafe, and the removal of the backlight keys irks the crap out of me, but to keep things in perspective, I’m excited enough about owning an M1-powered laptop that I dropped a bit over $1,500 of my own dollars on one even though my current laptop was still basically fine.
The new Air’s battery life is outstanding, and it feels like I’ve finally gotten a portable with the endurance I’ve always wanted. The storage subsystem is quick, load times are minimal, and doing several things on the M1 MacBook Air at once is as quick and responsive as it is when I do the same tasks on my desktop—and my desktop is a Xeon-powered iMac Pro.
I don’t like using too many superlatives in hardware reviews—at least, in hardware reviews that don’t involve flight simulator equipment (for reviews that do involve flight simulator equipment, it’s superlatives for days!). And while I can’t say the M1 MacBook Air is the perfect laptop, I can say that it’s excellent.
<a href="https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/JT3A5942.jpg" class="enlarge" data-height="2737" data-width="4101" alt="I like it!“><img alt="I like it!” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/JT3A5942-640×427.jpg” width=”640″ height=”427″ srcset=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/JT3A5942-1280×854.jpg 2x”>
Seriously, I just wasn’t expecting the M1—I wasn’t expecting it to be this ludicrously fast for the price and the wattage. I wasn’t expecting the new chip to just work—though given Apple’s previous architecture switches, I probably should have. I wasn’t expecting the Air to kick as much ass as it does. Unlike most portables—including the i7-powered 2015 MBA I’m getting ready to retire—it gets the hell out of my way and doesn’t make me wait on it when I want to do something.
It’s great. And I’m excited to see what Apple does next.
The Good
Fast as hell
Battery lasts a long-ass time
Common x86 apps seem to work perfectly under Rosetta 2
To this casual laptop user, the M1 feels pretty dang amazing
Checks almost every box I care about when it comes to hardware I want to own and use
The Bad
No keyboard backlight adjustment keys
You might run into Rosetta compatibility issues with less-common apps
No Windows virtualization (not yet, at least)
The loss of MagSafe still stings, even after literally years
The Ugly
It’s such an improvement over Intel-based MacBook Airs that you might find yourself spending a thousand unplanned dollars to join the Apple Silicon club
The bottom line
It’s like I said in the beginning of the piece: it’s fast. The battery life is great. The M1 seems like a hit, and given Apple’s success at iterating on their silicon designs, it seems like things are only going to get faster. If you’re looking for a portable, and you’re not tied to Windows, the M1 MacBook Air is a pretty damn good use of your money.
The federal government is ordering the dissolution of TikTok’s Canadian business after a national security review of the Chinese company behind the social media platform, but stopped short of ordering people to stay off the app.
Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne announced the government’s “wind up” demand Wednesday, saying it is meant to address “risks” related to ByteDance Ltd.’s establishment of TikTok Technology Canada Inc.
“The decision was based on the information and evidence collected over the course of the review and on the advice of Canada’s security and intelligence community and other government partners,” he said in a statement.
The announcement added that the government is not blocking Canadians’ access to the TikTok application or their ability to create content.
However, it urged people to “adopt good cybersecurity practices and assess the possible risks of using social media platforms and applications, including how their information is likely to be protected, managed, used and shared by foreign actors, as well as to be aware of which country’s laws apply.”
Champagne’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment seeking details about what evidence led to the government’s dissolution demand, how long ByteDance has to comply and why the app is not being banned.
A TikTok spokesperson said in a statement that the shutdown of its Canadian offices will mean the loss of hundreds of well-paying local jobs.
“We will challenge this order in court,” the spokesperson said.
“The TikTok platform will remain available for creators to find an audience, explore new interests and for businesses to thrive.”
The federal Liberals ordered a national security review of TikTok in September 2023, but it was not public knowledge until The Canadian Press reported in March that it was investigating the company.
At the time, it said the review was based on the expansion of a business, which it said constituted the establishment of a new Canadian entity. It declined to provide any further details about what expansion it was reviewing.
A government database showed a notification of new business from TikTok in June 2023. It said Network Sense Ventures Ltd. in Toronto and Vancouver would engage in “marketing, advertising, and content/creator development activities in relation to the use of the TikTok app in Canada.”
Even before the review, ByteDance and TikTok were lightning rod for privacy and safety concerns because Chinese national security laws compel organizations in the country to assist with intelligence gathering.
Such concerns led the U.S. House of Representatives to pass a bill in March designed to ban TikTok unless its China-based owner sells its stake in the business.
Champagne’s office has maintained Canada’s review was not related to the U.S. bill, which has yet to pass.
Canada’s review was carried out through the Investment Canada Act, which allows the government to investigate any foreign investment with potential to might harm national security.
While cabinet can make investors sell parts of the business or shares, Champagne has said the act doesn’t allow him to disclose details of the review.
Wednesday’s dissolution order was made in accordance with the act.
The federal government banned TikTok from its mobile devices in February 2023 following the launch of an investigation into the company by federal and provincial privacy commissioners.
— With files from Anja Karadeglija in Ottawa
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 6, 2024.
LONDON (AP) — Most people have accumulated a pile of data — selfies, emails, videos and more — on their social media and digital accounts over their lifetimes. What happens to it when we die?
It’s wise to draft a will spelling out who inherits your physical assets after you’re gone, but don’t forget to take care of your digital estate too. Friends and family might treasure files and posts you’ve left behind, but they could get lost in digital purgatory after you pass away unless you take some simple steps.
Here’s how you can prepare your digital life for your survivors:
Apple
The iPhone maker lets you nominate a “ legacy contact ” who can access your Apple account’s data after you die. The company says it’s a secure way to give trusted people access to photos, files and messages. To set it up you’ll need an Apple device with a fairly recent operating system — iPhones and iPads need iOS or iPadOS 15.2 and MacBooks needs macOS Monterey 12.1.
For iPhones, go to settings, tap Sign-in & Security and then Legacy Contact. You can name one or more people, and they don’t need an Apple ID or device.
You’ll have to share an access key with your contact. It can be a digital version sent electronically, or you can print a copy or save it as a screenshot or PDF.
Take note that there are some types of files you won’t be able to pass on — including digital rights-protected music, movies and passwords stored in Apple’s password manager. Legacy contacts can only access a deceased user’s account for three years before Apple deletes the account.
Google
Google takes a different approach with its Inactive Account Manager, which allows you to share your data with someone if it notices that you’ve stopped using your account.
When setting it up, you need to decide how long Google should wait — from three to 18 months — before considering your account inactive. Once that time is up, Google can notify up to 10 people.
You can write a message informing them you’ve stopped using the account, and, optionally, include a link to download your data. You can choose what types of data they can access — including emails, photos, calendar entries and YouTube videos.
There’s also an option to automatically delete your account after three months of inactivity, so your contacts will have to download any data before that deadline.
Facebook and Instagram
Some social media platforms can preserve accounts for people who have died so that friends and family can honor their memories.
When users of Facebook or Instagram die, parent company Meta says it can memorialize the account if it gets a “valid request” from a friend or family member. Requests can be submitted through an online form.
The social media company strongly recommends Facebook users add a legacy contact to look after their memorial accounts. Legacy contacts can do things like respond to new friend requests and update pinned posts, but they can’t read private messages or remove or alter previous posts. You can only choose one person, who also has to have a Facebook account.
You can also ask Facebook or Instagram to delete a deceased user’s account if you’re a close family member or an executor. You’ll need to send in documents like a death certificate.
TikTok
The video-sharing platform says that if a user has died, people can submit a request to memorialize the account through the settings menu. Go to the Report a Problem section, then Account and profile, then Manage account, where you can report a deceased user.
Once an account has been memorialized, it will be labeled “Remembering.” No one will be able to log into the account, which prevents anyone from editing the profile or using the account to post new content or send messages.
X
It’s not possible to nominate a legacy contact on Elon Musk’s social media site. But family members or an authorized person can submit a request to deactivate a deceased user’s account.
Passwords
Besides the major online services, you’ll probably have dozens if not hundreds of other digital accounts that your survivors might need to access. You could just write all your login credentials down in a notebook and put it somewhere safe. But making a physical copy presents its own vulnerabilities. What if you lose track of it? What if someone finds it?
Instead, consider a password manager that has an emergency access feature. Password managers are digital vaults that you can use to store all your credentials. Some, like Keeper,Bitwarden and NordPass, allow users to nominate one or more trusted contacts who can access their keys in case of an emergency such as a death.
But there are a few catches: Those contacts also need to use the same password manager and you might have to pay for the service.
___
Is there a tech challenge you need help figuring out? Write to us at onetechtip@ap.org with your questions.
LONDON (AP) — Britain’s competition watchdog said Thursday it’s opening a formal investigation into Google’s partnership with artificial intelligence startup Anthropic.
The Competition and Markets Authority said it has “sufficient information” to launch an initial probe after it sought input earlier this year on whether the deal would stifle competition.
The CMA has until Dec. 19 to decide whether to approve the deal or escalate its investigation.
“Google is committed to building the most open and innovative AI ecosystem in the world,” the company said. “Anthropic is free to use multiple cloud providers and does, and we don’t demand exclusive tech rights.”
San Francisco-based Anthropic was founded in 2021 by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, who previously worked at ChatGPT maker OpenAI. The company has focused on increasing the safety and reliability of AI models. Google reportedly agreed last year to make a multibillion-dollar investment in Anthropic, which has a popular chatbot named Claude.
Anthropic said it’s cooperating with the regulator and will provide “the complete picture about Google’s investment and our commercial collaboration.”
“We are an independent company and none of our strategic partnerships or investor relationships diminish the independence of our corporate governance or our freedom to partner with others,” it said in a statement.
The U.K. regulator has been scrutinizing a raft of AI deals as investment money floods into the industry to capitalize on the artificial intelligence boom. Last month it cleared Anthropic’s $4 billion deal with Amazon and it has also signed off on Microsoft’s deals with two other AI startups, Inflection and Mistral.
