The European Commission has ordered Meta to restore rival AI chatbot makers' access to the WhatsApp Business API within five working days, issuing rare interim measures this week after concluding that the company's restrictions risked causing 'serious and irreparable' harm to competition in the fast-moving AI assistant market.
The order requires Meta to reinstate the terms and conditions that were in place before October 15, 2025, when the company moved to bar third-party general-purpose AI assistants — including OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot — from the business messaging platform while keeping its own Meta AI available. The restriction took full effect in January.
'AI markets are developing exceptionally fast, and AI assistants are expected to become an important way for consumers all across Europe to access and use AI,' said Teresa Ribera, the Commission's executive vice president for competition. 'In rapidly evolving markets, competition can be lost long before a final decision is adopted.'
The Commission opened its investigation in December into whether Meta is abusing a dominant position in business messaging. Regulators examined a fee-based access proposal Meta floated in April and found it insufficient — Ribera said the fees were set so high that using WhatsApp was 'no longer economically viable' for competitors.
Meta reacted sharply and said it will appeal. 'The European Commission has decided that OpenAI and some of the largest companies in the world can use the paid-for WhatsApp Business product for free. This is regulatory overreach subsidized by the many European companies that pay,' the company said in a statement.
The interim measures remain in force until the underlying investigation concludes or June 2029, whichever comes first. Non-compliance could expose Meta to fines of up to 10 percent of its global annual revenue.
The case is the EU's most aggressive intervention yet at the intersection of antitrust and AI, and it lands as regulators on both sides of the Atlantic scrutinize how platform owners treat rival AI products. For OpenAI, Microsoft and others, WhatsApp's reach — more than two billion users — makes the business API one of the most valuable distribution channels an assistant can have.