News in brief: Microsoft Accuses FTC of Leaking Antitrust Investigation; Amazon Breaks New Black Friday Record and Releases AI Models 

Microsoft Accuses FTC of Leaking Antitrust Investigation

Last week, news broke that the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had opened an antitrust investigation into Microsoft’s practices – now, the tech giant accuses the commission of leaking details about the investigation. Rima Alaily, Microsoft’s corporate vice president and deputy general counsel has asked the FTC Inspector General – on behalf of the company – to investigate whether FTC management improperly leaked confidential information about the investigation in violation of the agency’s ethics rules. The agency’s guidelines state that “the existence of an FTC investigation is nonpublic information”. She also claims that Microsoft has still not been able to obtain a copy of the information demand supposedly issued to the company, despite it having been circulating in the press. 

Amazon Breaks New Black Friday Record

Elsewhere in the big tech landscape, Amazon reports that it broke new sales records for Black Friday week through to Cyber Monday, surpassing figures from the same period in previous years. The event was also the biggest for Amazon’s independent sellers, who were responsible for 60% of sales. Many UK consumers opted to purchase used, refurbished and open-box products through Amazon Resale. 

Amazon Releases AI Models

Amazon has also announced the launch of its own set of AI models, Amazon Nova, consisting of Micro, Lite and Pro. According to a blog post from the company, Amazon Nova can be used to lower costs and latency for generative AI tasks. The models accept text, image and video inputs to generate text output, while text and image input is accepted to generate image or video output. All models are available exclusively in Amazon Bedrock.