“Our study will shed light on whether investments and partnerships pursued by dominant companies risk distorting innovation and undermining fair competition,” Lina Khan, the F.T.C. chair, said in a statement.

The inquiry is the first major effort by the agency to understand the way the companies are using partnerships and investments to rapidly expand their influence in A.I. Ms. Khan, who was appointed in 2021, has long pushed to modernize the way the government deploys antitrust law. That has included her agency filing an antitrust suit against Amazon last year for artificially raising prices and asking courts to embrace more novel theories about how corporations can harm the economy.