The French Competition Authority has expanded its regulatory scrutiny into artificial intelligence by examining the competitive landscape of the AI agent sector, following its previous analyses of cloud computing and generative AI. AI tools have rapidly evolved from simple conversational assistants into advanced agents capable of reasoning, planning, and coordinating complex tasks. Despite a dynamic market with numerous vendors, user concentration is exceptionally high, with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic collectively controlling over 84% of the market.
While barriers to market entry are lower than those required for training foundational generative models, the Authority notes that scaling an AI agent business remains heavily constrained. New entrants face significant barriers to expansion, including restricted data access, technical migration hurdles, interoperability challenges, and high inference costs.
A primary concern highlighted by the regulator is the emerging “platformization” of AI agents. By acting as centralized interfaces that aggregate services and information, these agents are becoming powerful new intermediaries in the digital economy. This positioning introduces severe competitive risks, such as market disintermediation, discrimination, and visibility issues for third-party services. These risks are heavily amplified when dominant, vertically integrated tech companies embed AI agents directly into their existing ecosystems.
The investigation also highlights the rapid rise of “agentic commerce”—the application of AI agents to online retail. Though not yet available in France, its rapid deployment could soon disrupt the sector as agents shift from product recommendations to automating entire purchasing processes. The Authority warns that centralized technical standards and poor interoperability could quickly make purchasing processes opaque, centralize retail activity around a few dominant players, and ultimately deprive consumers of informed choices.
Because these market disruptions could materialize rapidly, the Authority emphasizes the need for proactive, close monitoring. Rather than waiting for definitive growth scenarios to unfold, the regulator recommends that public authorities fully enforce existing regulatory frameworks to preserve consumer choice. Furthermore, it urges industry stakeholders to actively reject centralized governance by guaranteeing the implementation of open standards, system portability, and robust interoperability across the sector