2025-09-11T15:08:59Z
Google, Meta, and Amazon’s new favorite move is to raid teams instead of buying companies outright.
Big Tech may think it’s clever, but Lina Khan made clear that regulators aren’t fooled.
She said such deals could soon be scrutinized if there is “an effort to get around competition laws.”
Lina Khan, the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission, told a roomful of founders and investors that poaching talent in billion-dollar deals still amounts to an acquisition by another name — and it could someday meet the same scrutiny as blockbuster mergers.
“If these acqui-hires are being done in a way that is ultimately having a bad effect on competition, that is something that enforcers should be able to look at, and they should be looking at,” she said during a talk at NYC Summit, an annual gathering of tech builders and investors hosted by the early-stage venture firm Primary.
Big Tech isn’t buying startups at the rate it used to. Lately, it’s strip-mining them.
Meta hired Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang after investing $14.3 billion in the data labeling startup. Google picked off Windsurf’s chief executive and top researchers for a $2.4 billion licensing fee. Microsoft gutted Inflection, Amazon raided Adept, and so on. The deals appear to share a common goal: close quickly and dodge watchdogs.
Primary Venture Partners
Khan made clear in New York that regulators aren’t fooled. “If it is an effort to get around competition laws,” she said, “it’s definitely something they should be able to reach.”
In May, the Justice Department said it was investigating whether Google violated antitrust laws through a pseudo-acquisition of Character.AI, a popular chatbot company. One year earlier, the FTC opened a probe into a Microsoft deal to hire Inflection’s cofounder and almost all of its employees.
Such deals could also gain more scrutiny in Europe. In an interview with Reuters last month, the outgoing head of the European Commission’s antitrust unit said it had urged member states to flag deals to hire key people, not acquire the company, to the group for review.
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