Why the EU's Push to Open WhatsApp to Third-Party AI Assistants Threatens American Technological Leadership

The European Commission recently alleged that Meta’s policies restricting third-party artificial intelligence (AI) assistants on its messaging platform WhatsApp violate EU antitrust and competition rules. The Commission even intends to impose interim regulatory measures requiring Meta to make changes to its business practices while it investigates the case. By targeting and dictating terms on which AI assistants can operate on WhatsApp, the EU threatens to stifle innovation in the rapidly evolving domain of AI assistants for one of America's leading tech firms, creating an enormous advantage for foreign competitors.

Meta AI is an AI assistant built directly into WhatsApp's interface, powered by large language models (LLMs) that enable users to ask questions, generate text and images, and complete tasks. It allows WhatsApp users to revise drafts, generate context-aware responses, and analyze images or text all from within a familiar application. 

By owning and operating both the assistant and the underlying messaging platform, Meta can vertically integrate these services, optimizing performance and feature sets in ways that third-party developers cannot easily replicate. For example, Meta has developed private processing technology so that WhatsApp users can use AI in a secure and privacy-preserving way, engineering all data processing so that nobody, not even Meta, can access private messages. 

Years of sustained investment in research and development (R&D) have enabled Meta to roll out these advanced AI features on WhatsApp. Meta established its AI research division in 2013, spent nearly a decade translating research into consumer products, and launched an AI assistant on WhatsApp in April 2024. Since 2022, Meta has ranked among the top three R&D spenders in the global technology sector, with annual spending rising from $35.3 billion in 2022 to $57.4 billion in 2025, with a substantial share allocated to AI and machine learning. In 2025, Meta committed $60-65 billion to its AI infrastructure supporting over 1.3 million graphic processing units (GPUs), the specialized processors that power AI model training and deployment.

Having invested heavily in building its AI and messaging infrastructure, Meta has a legitimate interest in preserving this ecosystem it has spent years developing. By allowing firms that operate third-party AI assistants on WhatsApp, Meta effectively subsidizes rivals’ market entry, user acquisition, and product development costs. Rather than promoting genuine competition, such actions risk distorting the market and undermining Meta’s incentive to invest in long-term innovation.

Forcing third-party AI assistants onto WhatsApp would insert independent systems into this calibrated environment, increasing operational risk while leaving Meta responsible for any resulting failures. For example, Meta has noted that third-party AI assistants placed a burden on its servers and support teams. Third-party AI assistants may generate excessive requests, exceeding WhatsApp’s rate limits and resulting in temporary blocks or undelivered messages that disrupt user experience.

Third-party AI assistants also introduce significant security and privacy risks. Chatbots on platforms such as Telegram, Discord, and WhatsApp have eavesdropped on user messages, accessed sensitive data, and forwarded content to external vendors without consent. Meta would bear liability for any data breaches or data protection violations caused by third-party assistants operating on WhatsApp, despite having no control over their security practices. Indeed, European regulators held Facebook liable for the Cambridge Analytica data breach, which similarly involved a third-party accessing user data. Meta's decision to restrict third-party AI assistants reflects an attempt to learn these lessons.

Despite these legitimate justifications, Meta’s actions have drawn regulatory scrutiny. The Commission argues that Meta's decision to restrict third-party AI assistants limits developers of other AI assistants from expanding. However, these developers have multiple paths to grow including standalone apps, productivity tools, and distribution through other platforms and enterprise channels. Market success depends on innovation, not free riding on a competitor’s established infrastructure. 

In addition to the EU, authorities in Brazil and Italy have launched similar investigations. These duplicative inquiries impose significant compliance burdens on Meta. More broadly, this trend reflects the use of competition policy to shape the terms on which American technology companies allow rival AI products to operate on their platforms. 

If regulators require Meta to allow competing AI assistants on WhatsApp as a condition of deploying Meta AI, the company faces two unattractive choices. It can open the platform to third-party AI assistants, risking a degraded user experience through inconsistent quality, security vulnerabilities, disruptions, and spam. Such deterioration in platform quality will affect user retention, lower revenues, and limit Meta’s resources that can be used for improving AI assistants. 

Conversely, Meta can decline to deploy AI features altogether. This would leave WhatsApp without AI-enabled messaging while rivals integrate AI elsewhere, eroding its competitive position in a market where advanced features increasingly define future success. 

Either path constrains Meta's ability to learn from its over two billion users. At this stage of AI development, companies improve AI services through deployment at scale. Every interaction Meta loses is an important data point that its competitors would accumulate instead, slowing innovation cycles at a top American AI company at a crucial time for AI development. 

American policymakers should recognize that foreign regulators are systematically weaponizing the implementation of competition policy and respond decisively by challenging discriminatory regulatory actions that hurt U.S. companies. Allowing competition policy to become a tool for undermining American technological leadership does not level the playing field, it tilts it toward China, accelerating China’s dominance in the digital economy.