Europe Forces Meta to Let Other AI Assistants Use WhatsApp

The European Commission has ordered Meta to allow competing AI assistants — including ChatGPT from OpenAI — to work on WhatsApp for free. This is a temporary but legally binding decision made while regulators investigate whether Meta is unfairly blocking competitors from the platform.

Reuters reported the order on 9 June 2026, and the European Commission formally published the details on 14 April 2026. The case, labeled AT.41034, focuses on whether Meta is using WhatsApp's enormous user base to give its own AI an unfair advantage.

Why Europe Is Taking Action

The European Commission opened an investigation on 3 December 2025. The concern was simple: Meta owns WhatsApp, which has over two billion users worldwide. Currently, Meta's own AI assistant can integrate directly with WhatsApp, but competing assistants cannot. The Commission considers this unfair — like letting one store brand stock shelves at every supermarket while blocking rivals from doing the same.

The speed of this decision is unusual. Regulators typically take years to finish an investigation. Here, the Commission issued a binding temporary order in less than five months. They moved fast because AI assistants are becoming popular so quickly. If one company owns the entire AI channel for a messaging platform, it could be nearly impossible for competitors to catch up later.

What the Order Requires

Meta must now allow competing AI assistants — like OpenAI's ChatGPT — to access WhatsApp the same way Meta AI can. They must do this for free. This matters because Meta could otherwise claim compliance while charging competitors such high fees that they could not afford to participate.

There is a real technical challenge here worth understanding. WhatsApp encrypts all messages by default, which means anyone reading your messages — including you — sees scrambled text that only the sender and receiver can decode. Giving other AI assistants access to WhatsApp while keeping this security in place is complicated engineering work. The Commission's order does not yet explain exactly how this will work, and that is something both Meta and regulators will need to figure out.

Why This Matters

Messaging apps like WhatsApp are becoming the main place people interact with AI. Instead of opening a separate app to chat with an AI assistant, users increasingly want that assistant built right into the conversations they are already having with friends and family.

WhatsApp's size gives Meta enormous power. An AI assistant that can reach two billion WhatsApp users has access to something no competitor can match: real conversations, contact information, and patterns of how people actually use messaging. That is the kind of data that makes an AI smarter. If only Meta AI can do this on WhatsApp, the company gains an unfair edge.

This pattern — where one company controls a popular platform and uses it to block competitors in a newer, related market — is familiar to anyone who lived through the browser wars. In the early 2000s, Europe spent years fighting Microsoft because the company was bundling Internet Explorer with Windows and making it hard for other browsers to compete. The argument was the same: you control the main distribution channel, so you are locked in. The WhatsApp case works the same way. The difference is that Europe is acting much faster this time, likely having learned from how slowly those earlier fights moved.

What Happens Next

Meta has not publicly said it accepts this order as final. The company is expected to challenge it as the main investigation continues. Interim measures like this one are temporary — they bind Meta while regulators finish their full case, but Meta can appeal to European courts.

Meta is already managing a lot of European regulation. The company follows rules from the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and now this separate competition case. All of these rules might overlap in ways that create confusion about what Meta actually needs to do. Regulators will need to be clear about how these different rules work together.

For businesses building AI products, this decision sends a message: Europe is willing to step in quickly to prevent large platforms from locking out competitors. If you run a major messaging service in Europe, you cannot simply decide that only your own AI assistant gets access. The practical cost to Meta is real too — building and maintaining a secure way for other AI assistants to use WhatsApp is expensive engineering work that the company will have to do while still developing its own AI.

The AT.41034 case is still ongoing. Europe has not yet decided whether Meta actually broke the law or what the final punishment will be. What is clear now is that WhatsApp's AI layer is no longer something Meta can keep entirely to itself. That will shape how AI assistants reach people through messaging around the world.