OpenAI May Have Accidentally Saved Google From a DOJ Breakup

Google just dodged the breakup of some of its key businesses, and it has an unlikely competitor to thank: OpenAI.

A federal judge ruled Tuesday that generative AI’s rise has made search more competitive, undermining the Justice Department’s case for carving up Google’s empire, which could have seen products like YouTube or Chrome become totally independent companies.

In Judge Amit Mehta’s decision on Tuesday, the rise of generative AI brought about by OpenAI’s ChatGPT was repeatedly mentioned for making the search business more competitive than ever. That weakened the case for radically restructuring Google’s operations.

Judge Mehta wrote that while generative AI hasn’t displaced Googling yet, AI startups could “end up being game changers.”

Tens of millions of people use GenAI chatbots, like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Anthropic’s Claude, to gather information that they previously sought through internet search, Mehta wrote.

Earlier in August, OpenAI revealed that ChatGPT is set to hit 700 million weekly active users, up from 500 million in March. The app for Google’s answer to ChatGPT, Gemini, had 450 million monthly active users, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said in July.

Mehta also mentioned the AI investment boom spurred by ChatGPT, which led to an “astonishing” rush of funding for AI startups whose products directly threaten traditional internet search.

Those companies are in a “better position to compete with Google than any traditional search company has been in decades,” Mehta wrote. Plus, they’re moving quickly to monetize their queries.

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None of this would have happened had OpenAI not launched ChatGPT back in 2022. Funnily enough, ChatGPT’s launch was seen as a moment of crisis for Google, which had been considered the main AI powerhouse before OpenAI’s arrival.

Google has since competed fiercely with OpenAI, launching its own chatbot, Bard, shortly after ChatGPT — and even extensively using ChatGPT to improve it, a Business Insider investigation found.

Google remains threatened by OpenAI’s new style of discovering information. In May, Google’s stock tanked after Apple said searches are shrinking because people are using AI instead.

But that’s a notable contrast to Google’s latest stock price, which hit an all-time high in after-hours trading on Tuesday thanks to the relative mildness of the antitrust decision.

In its statement on Judge Mehta’s decision, Google said the ruling correctly recognizes how much the industry has changed because of the advent of AI, which is giving people so many more ways to find information.

“This underlines what we’ve been saying since this case was filed in 2020: Competition is intense and people can easily choose the services they want,” the statement read.

Google and OpenAI didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment for this article.