The European Commission has ordered Meta to restore third-party AI chatbots’ access to WhatsApp after the tech giant decided to block them from operating on the popular messaging platform.
After Meta banned rival AI chatbots from operating on WhatsApp, the European Commission launched an antitrust investigation to determine whether the company had abused its market dominance. As a result of Meta’s decision, third-party AI chatbots, including Microsoft’s Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, were prevented from operating on WhatsApp.
At the time, Meta said it wanted to reserve the WhatsApp Business API for other types of businesses and did not allow rival chatbots to use it. This effectively prevented the WhatsApp ecosystem from being used to distribute rival chatbot services.
However, the European Commission has now announced an interim measures decision requiring Meta to restore access to WhatsApp for rival general-purpose AI assistants on the same terms and conditions as before October 15, 2025. The Commission has also asked Meta to maintain that access until the antitrust investigation is concluded.
The Commission argues that Meta has used its dominant market position to prevent rival AI chatbots from accessing the WhatsApp Business API. While Meta allowed rival services to return to WhatsApp by paying a fee, the European Commission still considers that arrangement to be a de facto access ban.
According to EU antitrust chief Teresa Ribera, the fees introduced by Meta are so high that using WhatsApp is no longer economically sustainable for competitors. “It seems that Meta expects to leverage the vast reach and likely dominance of WhatsApp to benefit its own AI assistant and to foreclose rivals,” Ribera said. “We cannot let large digital incumbents leverage their dominance of the past to dictate who in Europe gets to compete and who gets to innovate in AI.”