EU warns Meta over WhatsApp AI assistant lockout

Brussels is drawing an important line: you can’t use a dominant messaging app to choke off competition in AI assistants. Meta’s decision to block third‑party general‑purpose AI bots from WhatsApp while privileging its own Meta AI turns the chat app into a distribution bottleneck for conversational AI. By moving toward interim measures, the Commission is signaling that AI access rules on gatekeeper platforms will be policed in real time, not just years after the fact.

For the race to AGI, this is less about today’s narrow policy dispute and more about who controls the user interface for future general‑purpose agents. If WhatsApp became a walled garden where only Meta’s assistant could operate, that would dramatically tilt the playing field for data, feedback loops and monetization. Forced interoperability or non‑discriminatory access keeps the door open for smaller assistant vendors—and even open‑source models—to reach hundreds of millions of users without owning a massive consumer messaging network.

The outcome will set a template for how DMA‑style rules apply to AI across messaging, mobile operating systems and productivity suites. If regulators consistently block self‑preferencing of in‑house assistants, the competitive landscape for AGI‑class systems will remain more plural, with several companies able to accumulate usage data and revenue at scale instead of one or two super‑apps dominating the channel.