France: three companies control 84% of the AI agent market
France's competition authority published a sweeping opinion on the AI agents sector, finding that OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic together hold more than 84% of it. The 3,700-page report (with annexes) warns of platform-style lock-in and urges early action on data access, interoperability, and how default AI placements are handled. The regulator even built its own AI agents and logged which sites they visited across 550 shopping queries.
Why it mattersRegulators took a decade to catch up with social platforms; France is signaling it won't wait that long for AI agents. If agents become how people shop and browse, whoever controls the defaults controls the market — and Europe is laying groundwork to intervene before that hardens.
Read in the app — free, in 9 languages
Related stories
DeepSeek's cheap workhorse can now see — and on agent tasks that need eyes it says it is close to Anthropic's best2026-08-21Anthropic expects to raise as much as SpaceX did — the largest listing in history — and could file publicly this month
2026-08-21Nvidia is paying $6 billion for the machine that builds a rival's models — and hiring 109 of the people who ran it
2026-08-21The doctors and lawyers who grade AI answers are now a half-billion-dollar business — and this one grew fivefold in eight months
2026-08-21Given four hours and a GPU to improve the way AI is trained, the best agent scored 0.25 out of 1 — and most never tried
2026-08-21