Brussels forces Meta to reopen WhatsApp to rival AI assistants, free of charge

The European Commission has ordered Meta to throw open the doors of WhatsApp to rival artificial-intelligence assistants and to do so without charging a cent, an unusually forceful intervention that pits Brussels against one of Silicon Valley's largest companies at a formative moment for the AI industry.

In a decision adopted on 9 June and announced this week, the Commission instructed Meta to restore, within five working days, the free access to the WhatsApp Business application programming interface (API) that third-party AI assistants enjoyed before 15 October 2025. The measures will remain in force until the Commission concludes its underlying investigation. Should Meta fail to comply, it faces fines of up to 10 percent of its worldwide annual turnover, plus daily penalty payments.

The order is notable not only for its substance but for the legal instrument behind it. Despite widespread framing of the dispute as a test of the Digital Markets Act, the Commission acted under its older antitrust powers, invoking Article 8 of Regulation 1/2003 to impose interim measures: emergency relief used while a case is still being decided. It is only the second time Brussels has reached for that tool since it was deployed against the chipmaker Broadcom in October 2019, and underscores how seriously regulators view the contest now unfolding over who controls the gateways to AI.

What Meta did, and what it must now undo

The case, registered as AT.41034 and titled the exclusion of AI competitors from WhatsApp, turns on a policy change Meta introduced on 15 October 2025. The company began barring third-party general-purpose AI assistants from operating inside WhatsApp through its business interface, a restriction that took full effect on 15 January 2026 and severed the channel for products including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot and Perplexity, alongside smaller entrants that had built audiences within the messaging app.

Brussels opened formal proceedings on 4 December 2025. When Meta sought to defuse the probe in March by replacing the outright ban with a fee, reported at roughly 0.0625 dollars per message, the Commission was unmoved. In a supplementary set of objections in April, regulators concluded the charge was, in practice, equivalent to the original prohibition, and that it was not economically sustainable for competitors. The interim decision now requires Meta to revert to the pre-October terms entirely.

'Competition can be lost long before a final decision'

The Commission's reasoning rests on the doctrine of serious and irreparable harm. Interim measures are reserved for cases where there appears, at first sight, to be an infringement, and where the damage to competition would be so swift and lasting that waiting for a final ruling, a process that can take years, would let the harm become permanent. Markets for general-purpose AI assistants, the Commission argued, are precisely such a setting: a key moment when smaller players and new entrants can still challenge incumbents, and where foreclosure from a platform with billions of users could prove impossible to reverse.

On a preliminary basis, the Commission found that Meta holds a dominant position in consumer communications across the European Economic Area, and that shutting rivals out of WhatsApp amounted to a refusal to supply previously available access, raising barriers to entry in the emerging assistant market.

"In rapidly evolving markets, competition can be lost long before a final decision is adopted," said Teresa Ribera, the Commission's executive vice-president for clean, just and competitive transition, who oversees competition policy. She added that the bloc "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."

Meta vows to fight

Meta signalled it would challenge the order before the General Court, the EU's lower tribunal. In a statement, the company framed the decision as a subsidy extracted from European businesses for the benefit of its largest American rivals.

"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," a Meta spokesperson said. "This is regulatory overreach subsidised by the many European companies that pay. We will appeal."

Meta has also argued that admitting outside AI services into a platform built on end-to-end encryption raises privacy and security concerns, given the sensitivity of the messages users exchange. An appeal would not, on its own, suspend the order; Meta would need to seek a separate stay to delay compliance while the courts weigh the case.

A wider battle over Europe's digital sovereignty

The dispute lands amid a broader European effort to set the terms on which a handful of dominant platforms operate, an agenda that runs from the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act to the AI Act. By choosing the antitrust route rather than the DMA, the Commission demonstrated it can move quickly against conduct it deems urgent, without waiting for the slower machinery of gatekeeper enforcement to grind through. The instinct behind both frameworks is the same: prevent entrenched incumbents from using control of one market, here messaging, to capture an adjacent one, here AI assistants, before competition can take root.

For Luxembourg, the stakes are characteristically bloc-wide rather than local. As home to EU institutions including the Court of Justice and the General Court, where any Meta appeal would ultimately be heard, the Grand Duchy sits close to the machinery now testing the limits of European tech regulation. Luxembourg's data-protection authority, the CNPD, also forms part of the wider European apparatus scrutinising how the largest platforms handle personal data, a concern never far from any decision touching WhatsApp's billions of conversations.

The outcome will be watched well beyond Brussels. If the interim measures hold, they establish that Europe is prepared to pry open the most popular consumer apps to ensure that the next generation of AI tools is decided by competition rather than by the gatekeepers of the last era. If Meta prevails, the episode will mark the limits of how far regulators can go, how fast.