European Commission forces Meta to accept third-party chatbots in WhatsApp for free | Infinium-tech

Last year in November, Meta banned third-party chatbots in WhatsApp, but of course the company has created its own chatbot. EU officials have raised the issue, and the European Commission (EC) has specifically now ordered Meta to restore access to “rival general purpose AI assistants” in WhatsApp for free, and maintain it until the end of the EC’s antitrust investigation, in an original move by Meta to ban them.

The Commission’s press release said it would “prevent serious and irreparable harm being caused to competition in this growing market by Meta’s conduct, which prima facie violates EU competition rules”. The EC’s antitrust investigation into Meta’s ban on third-party chatbots in WhatsApp began in December and in February it “preliminarily concluded that interim measures may be required to prevent Meta’s policy change from causing serious and irreparable harm to the market”.

This order represents the above interim measures. The EC order is based on the fact that “Meta has prima facie held a dominant position in the European Economic Area-wide market for consumer communications applications since at least January 2023”, and that the company is “abusing this dominant position by preventing competing general purpose AI assistants from using the WhatsApp for Business API”.

The EC concluded that, prima facie, META’s ban on third-party chatbots in WhatsApp “denies access to infrastructure developed and already open to third parties”. In March, Meta accepted third-party general-purpose AI assistants into WhatsApp, but only for a fee, which the EC says is “a practice equivalent to previous access restrictions”.

Today’s order takes Meta back to the situation before October 2025, when third-party AI chatbots had free access to WhatsApp. Until the Election Commission takes a final decision on the matter, Meta will have to maintain access on those terms.

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