Andrew Ferguson

And so we have to apply the text that Congress actually wrote to specific deals.

But acqui-hires have become frequent enough and large enough that we are beginning to look at how we can

the appropriate way to apply the law that Congress actually adopted to acquihires.

It's not my job as an enforcer to sort of fit square pegs into round holes, but it is my job to make sure that the will of Congress, which is the will of the people at the end of the day, is being followed, and that's what we're here to try to do.

We're trying to figure out how that applies in the case of acquihires.

We've seen a couple in the last 12 months.

My understanding is that the act we hire sort of structure, if you want to call it that, where a firm acquires a lot of the talent in another firm is pretty old, it's been going on for a long time, but it often involves very small firms.

And I think the reason that a lot of people are starting to notice it is because now it involves much larger firms and the sort of price being attached to obtaining the talent

into licensing IP is in the billions.

So I've definitely seen a couple in the AI space this year, which is what has attracted a lot of the attention.

And it's why we're beginning to try to examine how are these working and how does the law that Congress passed governing pre-merger review actually apply here.

As well as the provision in the pre-merger review law that says you can't structure a deal in order to try to escape HSR review.

So that is what we are trying to understand now.

But certainly, I mean, you all have reported on them.

You can read about them in the Wall Street Journal.

It's definitely true that there have been a couple of these big ones in the AI area.

Yeah, so I can't talk about specific deals or specific potential investigations.

As a law enforcer, you know, I have to maintain a lot of confidentiality about the work of the commission.

But, I mean, you know, that particular structure, the acqui-hire, was different, for example, from the one that META conducted earlier in the year.

These things vary pretty wildly.