Episode 8- Madhavi Singh - Stargate to Search: AI Innovation, Publishers, and Competition Law's New Frontier

In this episode, Anush and Kena are joined by Madhavi Singh, Deputy Director of the Thurman Arnold Project and Resident Fellow at Yale Law School, as they explore the collision between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and competition law. This episode examines the Stargate Project (a $500 billion joint venture between OpenAI, Microsoft, Nvidia, Oracle, and Arm) and asks whether such massive-scale AI partnerships raise unique competition concerns for regulators. The discussion ranges from Google's evolving role in search markets (has it "broken its original bargain" by shifting from indexing to AI model training?) to the practical challenges of transatlantic regulatory divergence. Madhavi draws on her research to contrast the EU's early-mover approach to platform regulation with the US approach, examining whether the DMA's swift action on AI Overviews offers a template for addressing publisher concerns, or whether both jurisdictions risk stifling innovation at a critical moment in AI development. Whether you're tracking how competition authorities assess AI investments, curious about the evidence on AI features affecting publisher traffic, or interested in why the same regulatory questions produce different answers across the Atlantic, this conversation offers grounded analysis on where antitrust law meets the digital age.