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A tiered access plan from Meta $META +0.22% would let competing AI chatbots — among them OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Perplexity — use WhatsApp in Europe at no cost up to a set ceiling, with per-message charges kicking in beyond that point, Reuters reported, citing two people familiar with the matter.
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 -0.16% 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.
