EU orders Meta to reopen WhatsApp to rival AI chatbots, for free

Meta has been told to let rival AI chatbots back into WhatsApp, and to do it without charging them. The European Commission issued interim measures requiring the company to restore access to "rival general-purpose AI assistants" inside WhatsApp for free, and to keep that access in place until its antitrust investigation reaches a final decision. The order rolls things back to the situation before October 2025, when third-party assistants could plug into the platform at no cost.

What Meta did, and what the EC objected to

The timeline matters here. In November of last year, Meta banned third-party chatbots from WhatsApp while keeping its own Meta AI assistant built directly into the app. That is the core of the regulator's complaint: a company that controls the dominant messaging platform in Europe shut out competing AI services while continuing to promote its own.

The Commission opened an antitrust investigation in December, and by February it had preliminarily concluded that interim measures might be needed to stop the policy from "causing serious and irreparable harm" to the market. Today's order is the result. The EC found that Meta "has at first sight held a dominant position in the European Economic Area-wide market for consumer communication applications since at least January 2023," and that it abused that position by blocking competing assistants from using the WhatsApp for Business API.

The legal framing is specific. The Commission characterized the ban as "a refusal to provide access to an infrastructure developed and previously open to third parties." In plain terms, WhatsApp's API was something outside developers already relied on, and pulling access to it for AI competitors looked, to regulators, like leveraging control of one market to gain an edge in another.

The paid-access workaround did not satisfy regulators

Meta tried a middle path. In March, it began allowing third-party general-purpose AI assistants back into WhatsApp, but only for a fee. The Commission was not persuaded, calling the paid model "a practice equivalent to the previous access ban." The reasoning is that a fee high enough to discourage rivals achieves the same exclusionary result as an outright block. So the order is explicit that access must be free, on the same terms that applied before October 2025, and that Meta must maintain those terms until a final decision lands.

Why this matters beyond WhatsApp

This is a fight over distribution as much as it is about chatbots. WhatsApp is the default messaging app for a huge share of European users, and an AI assistant that lives inside the app a user already opens dozens of times a day has an enormous advantage over one that requires a separate download. The Commission is signaling that it views that built-in placement as an asset Meta cannot wall off from competitors while it sits on a dominant messaging platform.

The WhatsApp for Business API is the technical hinge. It is the same interface that companies use to build customer-service bots, booking systems, and notifications into WhatsApp. By treating AI assistants as just another category of service entitled to that infrastructure, the EC is extending established competition principles to a market that barely existed two years ago. The interim nature of the order is also notable. Regulators rarely intervene before concluding a case, and doing so here reflects a view that AI assistant adoption is moving fast enough that waiting for a final ruling could let market positions harden permanently.

For users, the practical effect should be more choice in which assistant they talk to inside WhatsApp rather than being funneled toward Meta AI by default. For the broader industry, it is an early test of how Europe intends to police the intersection of messaging platforms and AI, a question that will follow every large platform owner building its own assistant. Meta now has to comply while the investigation continues, and the final decision will determine whether free access becomes permanent or whether the company can argue for some other arrangement.