The proposal, submitted to E.U. antitrust regulators, comes after a January ban and a per-message fee drew regulatory scrutiny
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The submission arrived at the European Commission last week, timed to preempt a potential formal order that regulators had signaled they were weighing — one that would have compelled WhatsApp to accommodate third-party AI services under the Digital Markets Act. The Commission set a May 18 deadline for outside parties to weigh in before it makes a determination on whether to take Meta up on its proposal.
The proposal is Meta's third attempt to resolve the dispute. That reversal came after WhatsApp had shut out every external AI assistant beginning in January, a move that cut off services including ChatGPT, Microsoft $MSFT Copilot, and Perplexity. When Meta relented in March, it reopened WhatsApp to those services under a pricing model — $0.0625 for every message — that watchdogs and the companies themselves quickly deemed unviable in practice, according to The Next Web.
E.U. regulators responded by opening a second formal proceeding, and Meta agreed to pause the fee structure for thirty days as discussions with the Commission got underway. On its end, Meta indicated that competing chatbot services have been able to connect to WhatsApp's business API at no charge for a month-long window as the company seeks a durable resolution with Brussels.
Smaller competitors said the latest offer does not go far enough. Poke.com's parent, The Interaction Company of California, was dismissive of what Meta put forward. In a statement, the company said: "Unfortunately, Meta's current proposal is far from resolving any of the competition concerns identified in this case," and pushed Brussels to move ahead with interim measures should Meta fail to table something more meaningful. Jeremy Andre, who founded the French startup Agentik, argued that the terms create an uneven playing field by carving out Meta's own AI assistant from the same conditions imposed on competitors — though Meta pointed out that its chatbot operates outside the WhatsApp API framework entirely.
Publicly, the Commission withheld detailed comment but restated its overarching goal of preserving a competitive environment for AI assistant developers, adding that it views the current offer as a basis for continued negotiation rather than a final resolution.
The case falls under the Digital Markets Act, which imposes interoperability obligations on designated gatekeeper platforms. WhatsApp ships with Meta's own AI assistant built in as the default option, meaning traffic the platform steers toward Meta AI is traffic that does not reach rivals like OpenAI or Perplexity, according to The Next Web. Regulators have indicated their view that the DMA's interoperability requirements govern precisely this kind of rivalry — where a gatekeeper platform's own product enjoys a structural distribution advantage over outside services.
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