EU Orders Meta to Restore WhatsApp Access for Rival AI Chatbots

The European Commission on 9 June 2026 ordered Meta Platforms to give rival general-purpose AI assistants free access to WhatsApp while it completes an antitrust probe into the company’s October 2025 policy change. The decision, only the second use of interim measures the Commission has deployed under Regulation 1/2003, gives Meta five working days to restore the access terms that were in place before 15 October 2025. Meta said it will appeal the order, calling it “regulatory overreach.”

Interim measures are a rare tool the Commission can use when it sees a risk of serious and irreparable damage to competition that could become hard to reverse by the time a final ruling lands. The order reinstates free access for third-party AI chatbots to the WhatsApp for Business API, the interface through which outside services connect to the messaging platform. If Meta fails to comply, it faces fines of up to 10% of its total turnover, plus daily penalty payments of up to 5% of average daily turnover. The substantive investigation, opened in December 2025, is still open.

What the Commission Ordered Meta to Do

The order, issued under Article 8 of Regulation 1/2003, requires Meta to re-instate the terms and conditions for third-party general-purpose AI assistants on the WhatsApp for Business API that were in place before 15 October 2025. Those terms were free of charge for service messages sent to users. The decision leaves Meta free to set different commercial terms for messages outside the scope of the order, including marketing and utility categories that businesses pay to send. The Commission concluded, at first sight, that Meta’s policy change constituted a refusal to provide access to an infrastructure that had previously been open to third parties.

The order runs until the Commission adopts a final decision in the underlying antitrust case, registered as AT.41034.

In rapidly evolving markets, competition can be lost long before a final decision is adopted. This is why these interim measures will remain in place for the duration of the investigation.

Teresa Ribera, the Commission’s executive vice-president for clean, just and competitive transition, said this in a statement accompanying the order. Ribera also said the decision “preserved choice for citizens across Europe on the AI assistants they want to use with WhatsApp, without that decision being made for them.” The Commission found that Meta has at first sight held a dominant position in the EEA-wide market for consumer communication applications since at least January 2023. Officials have not publicly detailed the technical scope of the access to be restored, leaving questions about rate limits, feature parity, and review timelines for the implementation phase.

The Six-Month Path to the Order

The order is the product of a six-month investigation that began after Meta, on 15 October 2025, quietly changed the rules of the WhatsApp for Business API to bar third-party general-purpose AI assistants. Only Meta AI remained accessible on the platform. The change mattered because, before the ban, companies could send notifications through WhatsApp, such as order alerts, using AI assistants other than Meta’s own. The Commission opened a formal antitrust probe in December 2025 and, by February 2026, had issued a Statement of Objections warning that interim measures might be required. A supplementary Statement of Objections followed in April 2026, setting out the Commission’s intent to order Meta to reinstate third-party access. Meta’s October 2025 policy ban was first reported as a sweeping ban on third-party AI tools.

1. 15 October 2025: Meta bars third-party general-purpose AI assistants from the WhatsApp for Business API. Meta AI is the only assistant left.
2. December 2025: European Commission opens a formal antitrust investigation.
3. February 2026: Commission issues a Statement of Objections flagging possible interim measures.
4. 4 March 2026: Meta revises the policy, allowing third-party assistants back for a fee.
5. April 2026: Commission issues a supplementary Statement of Objections signalling an interim order.
6. 9 June 2026: Commission imposes interim measures, giving Meta 5 working days to comply.

The Commission’s reasoning for treating the March fee as another form of exclusion is laid out in the Commission’s interim measures decision against Meta. The fee, it concluded, was at first sight equivalent in practice to the previous outright ban. According to one outlet, Ribera told journalists at a press event that the fee Meta was charging for third-party access was too high. The substantive investigation continues in parallel with the interim order.

The Hidden Stakeholder Behind the Order

The Commission’s case is against Meta. The entity that pushed the Commission to act was a small Palo Alto startup called The Interaction Company of California. Its product, Poke.com, is a messaging-first AI assistant that runs inside WhatsApp, Telegram, and iMessage, taking instructions from a phone number rather than a separate app. Founded in June 2024 by Marvin von Hagen and Felix Schlegel, the company is the complainant whose filing led to the formal investigation. Its lawyers at the Brussels office of Geradin Partners, a pan-European competition firm, secured the interim measures in the antitrust case.

In a statement, Geradin Partners lawyer Jérémie Jourdan framed the order as a victory for “competition in the AI assistant market more broadly” and for Interaction specifically. “The Commission has recognised what we have argued since the outset,” he said, “that Meta’s conduct, first an outright ban, then a prohibitive fee that functioned as one, was designed to foreclose the distribution channel that matters most for AI assistants in Europe.” The case note is available at the law firm’s note on the Interaction Company case. The position the small company is defending is one shared by larger rivals including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Perplexity, all of which were cut off from the WhatsApp distribution channel in October 2025. Jourdan said the firm “will continue to support our client in the ongoing substantive investigation, as well as in the parallel proceedings before other authorities, including Brazil’s CADE and the Turkish Competition Authority.”

The order matters for these companies because, before the ban, the WhatsApp Business API was a low-friction route to users who already had a chat app open. A user could text Poke.com a request to draft a message, schedule a meeting, or pull a file from a connected inbox, all without installing a new application. That kind of distribution is hard to replicate for a small company without a Meta-sized user base. The mechanics of that user experience are spelled out in the third-party AI ban explained for app users.

• For users, the AI assistant lives inside WhatsApp with no separate app to install.
• For developers, the WhatsApp Business API was the lowest-cost route to a Meta-sized user base.
• For Meta, the same channel was being repurposed to give its own assistant an exclusive foothold.
• For Brussels, the October 2025 change and the March 2026 fee looked like the same exclusion twice.

Poke.com’s specific harm was that the channel that mattered most for an AI assistant trying to reach European consumers was being closed off by the platform owner that owns the channel. The interim order restores the channel, at least on the pre-ban terms, for the length of the antitrust probe. The order does not, however, set a price for what comes next. The substantive investigation will eventually decide whether the original conduct was an unlawful abuse of dominance and what remedy, if any, follows. A parallel set of proceedings is moving through Brazil’s CADE and the Turkish Competition Authority, both of which have been kept informed by the same complainant.

Why Brussels Used Interim Measures for Only the Second Time

Interim measures are the most aggressive tool the Commission can use before a final ruling, and it almost never uses them. The decision is only the second time the Commission has imposed interim measures under Regulation 1/2003, the framework that governs EU antitrust enforcement. The first came in October 2019, when the Commission ordered Broadcom to stop certain practices in the TV and modem chipset markets while the underlying case played out. The rarity of the tool is part of the signal: regulators have to show both a prima facie infringement and an urgent risk of serious and irreparable harm to competition to deploy it.

• 5 working days: the compliance window after which fines can begin.
• 10% of total turnover in the preceding business year: the cap on a fine for non-compliance.
• 5% of average daily turnover in the preceding business year: the cap on a daily penalty payment.
• Since 2019: the last time the Commission imposed interim measures under Regulation 1/2003, in a case against Broadcom.

The numbers attached to the order also make clear that the dominance finding, covering EEA-wide consumer communication applications since at least January 2023, will shape the eventual merits ruling if the Commission concludes the conduct amounted to an abuse. The investigation sits inside a wider pattern of EU enforcement, with the BBC noting the order follows a separate fine on Meta the previous week.

Meta’s Counter and the Road Ahead

Meta’s response, issued the same day, framed the order as a subsidy for the world’s largest AI companies. “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,” the company said in a statement, also reported at Meta’s statement calling the EU order regulatory overreach. “This is regulatory overreach subsidised by the many European companies that pay. We will appeal.” The company has not yet specified where the appeal will be filed. Meta’s broader argument is that it should be free to set commercial terms for access to infrastructure it built and operates.

Underlying Meta’s framing is a point the Commission itself acknowledges: the WhatsApp Business API is a paid product for many European businesses, and the order effectively requires Meta to extend the same free terms to general-purpose AI assistants. The Commission concludes that those terms are appropriate because the API was free for service messages before 15 October 2025 and the change was the suspected infringement. Whether the appeal succeeds will depend on a court’s view of the prima facie case the Commission has set out.

The substantive investigation continues in parallel with the interim order. The Commission’s preliminary view, set out in the February and April 2026 Statements of Objections, is that Meta abused its dominant position by reserving the WhatsApp AI access channel for its own assistant. Meta’s full response to the substantive case has not been published. Poke.com and the law firm that represented it in this round have signalled they will press the merits case too, alongside the parallel proceedings in Brazil and Turkey. If the Commission eventually upholds the abuse finding, the available remedies range from behavioural commitments to fines, and the interim order will be folded into the final ruling. The substantive case has no legal deadline; the Commission has said duration depends on factors including the complexity of the matter and the parties’ cooperation.