The European Fee has informed Meta it intends to impose “interim measures” to cease the tech large from excluding third-party AI assistants from WhatsApp.
On Monday, the EU knowledgeable the corporate that its preliminary view was that it had “breached” EU antitrust guidelines. The investigation remains to be ongoing, and measures are topic to Meta’s reply and rights of protection, the Fee stated.
The bloc’s Commissioner for Competitors, Teresa Ribera, stated it could stop “dominant tech corporations to illegally leverage their dominance to provide themselves an unfair benefit” to guard “efficient competitors.”
“AI markets are growing at speedy tempo, so we additionally must be swift in our motion. That’s the reason we’re contemplating rapidly imposing interim measures on Meta, to protect entry for rivals to WhatsApp, whereas the investigation is ongoing, and keep away from Meta’s new coverage irreparably harming competitors in Europe,” she added.
In October, Meta introduced an replace to its WhatsApp Enterprise Resolution Phrases, “successfully” banning third-party general-purpose AI assistants from the applying, the Fee stated. The coverage got here into impact in January.
A Fee spokesperson informed CNBC that interim measures would contain it asking Meta to keep up third-party AI assistants’ entry to WhatsApp underneath the phrases earlier than the coverage change, whereas its investigation.
“The details are that there isn’t any cause for the EU to intervene within the WhatsApp Enterprise API,” a Meta spokesperson stated.
“There are numerous AI choices and folks can use them from app shops, working methods, gadgets, web sites, and trade partnerships. The Fee’s logic incorrectly assumes the WhatsApp Enterprise API is a key distribution channel for these chatbots,” they added.
U.S. huge tech corporations had been hit with a slew of fines in 2025 for breaching EU guidelines.
In April, Apple was fined 500 million euros after being discovered to have breached anti-steering obligations.
The identical month, Meta was hit with a 200 million euros effective for breaching obligations to provide shoppers the selection of a service that makes use of much less of their private information.
In September, the Fee fined Google 2.95 billion euros for breaching antitrust guidelines round internet advertising.
