Italy tells Meta to suspend its policy to ban AI chatbots from WhatsApp

Italy has ordered Meta to suspend its policy of banning companies from using WhatsApp’s business tools to provide their own AI chatbots on the popular social media app.

The Italian Competition Authority (AGCM) on Wednesday he said found sufficient reason in its ongoing investigation if Meta is abusing its dominant position in the market to provide its Meta AI chats within WhatsApp to prevent the suspension of this policy.

“Meta’s conduct appears to be abusive, as it may limit production, market access, or technological development in the AI ​​Chatbot market, to the detriment of consumers,” the Authority wrote. “Furthermore, if the investigation continues, Meta’s conduct may cause serious and irreversible damage to competition in the affected market, reducing competition.”

AGCM in November expanded the scope of Meta’s previous research, after the company changed its API business plan in October preventing multi-purpose chatbots from being served on social media via an API.

Meta has argued that its API is not designed to be a platform for distributing chatbots and that people have more ways than WhatsApp to use AI bots from other companies. The policy change, which will take effect in January, will affect the availability of AI chatbots from OpenAI, Perplexity, and Poke on the app.

The law does not affect businesses that are using AI to serve customers on WhatsApp. For example, a seller with an AI-powered customer support bot will not be banned from using the API. Only AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Claude are restricted from being distributed through the API.

European Commission this month he also started research into the new system, raising concerns that it “could prevent third-party AI providers from offering their services through WhatsApp in the European Economic Area (‘EEA’).”

Calling the Authority’s decision “absolutely wrong,” Meta said the WhatsApp API business is not the way to market for AI companies.

“The appearance of AI chatbots on our Business API creates problems for our systems that were not designed to support them. The Italian authorities think that WhatsApp is somehow a defacto app store. The way to market for AI companies is to store themselves, their websites and corporate partnerships; not the WhatsApp Business Platform. We will appeal,” Meta said in his email statement.

Note: This article has been edited to add Meta’s response to the decision.