Start the day here

Business — France — AI Agents

France Found Three Labs Already Own the Agents

France's competition authority did not wait for agentic commerce to finish arriving. On July 17 it published Opinion 26-A-05 and put a number on the present: OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic already hold more than 84 percent of the global AI agent market, according to Sensor Tower data from May.

The opinion draws a clean line between chatbots that answer and agents that plan, reason, and coordinate other agents with a degree of autonomy. The European Commission definition quoted inside the report is blunter still: software that perceives a virtual environment and operates without direct human control.

5 min read
A customer pays at a retail counter while holding a phone.

Between May 20 and 30, the Authority ran its own probes through the ChatGPT and Gemini APIs. It asked 350 purchase-intent questions and 200 follow-ups across electronics, appliances, hotels, and transport, then tracked visits versus citations. ChatGPT leaned hard on Reddit for discovery visits (87.4 percent) while citing it in only 1.0 percent of answers. Gemini's shopping-completion path ran through Idealo and Cdiscount at rates ChatGPT never matched. Two agents, same shopping task, different internet.

Entry is easier than expansion. Third-party models lower the cost of launching an agent; default placement inside phones, browsers, and office suites raises the cost of reaching users. Inference costs grow with every orchestration step. An EY figure cited alongside the opinion puts average agent orchestration around $1.20 in 2026, up from four cents for a single response in 2023. Lock-in follows from retained histories that make switching painful.

Google's Universal Commerce Protocol and OpenAI's Agentic Commerce Protocol are racing to become the plumbing of automated purchase. Whoever governs the standard steers which merchants are reachable and on what terms. The Authority wants those standards open. It also wants existing EU tools, from the AI Act and DMA to the DSA, GDPR, and Data Act, applied fast rather than waiting for a new law that arrives after the market has already closed.

Corporate lawyers are busy inventing liability boxes for AI managers. France measured something more immediate: the gateway already forming around everyday choice. When software shops for you, ranking is power, and three American labs currently hold most of that power.

The Authority calls the opinion advisory and denies it is an antitrust verdict. Fine. The map still matters. Traffic from agents to e-commerce sites in France sits under 5 percent today and could approach a quarter by 2030 on the Authority's forecast. If that ramp arrives while three firms mediate the interface, informed consumer choice becomes a slogan about a screen someone else designed. France did the boring work of counting. Treat the count as a warning.

Letters

0

No letters yet.

Write a letter