The European Commission deployed a rare antitrust weapon to force Meta to let rival AI chatbots back onto WhatsApp, and ChatGPT is the first beneficiary.
OpenAI re-enabled ChatGPT on WhatsApp across the European Economic Area on July 13, covering 27 EU member states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway. Users can reach the chatbot by messaging the verified contact 1-800-CHATGPT (+1-800-242-8478) with no account required.
Text prompts, image uploads, voice messages, and image generation all work inside the messenger. The return ends a six-month exile. Meta banned ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Perplexity from WhatsApp on January 15, 2026, after changing its WhatsApp Business API terms in October 2025.
The new rules prohibited general-purpose AI assistants from using the API while allowing narrowly defined corporate bots for support, bookings, and order status. Only Meta's own AI assistant stayed. The European Commission saw it differently.
In December 2025, it opened a formal antitrust investigation into whether Meta was using WhatsApp's dominant position in the EEA consumer communications market to give its AI an unfair advantage. When Meta tried a March revision that let third-party assistants back in for a fee, the Commission ruled the pricing constituted a de facto ban.
On June 9, the Commission issued an interim measures order under Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, only the second such order under Regulation 1/2003. Meta was instructed to restore free access to the WhatsApp Business API for rival AI assistants within five working days, under the same terms that applied before October 15, 2025.
Noncompliance exposes Meta to fines of up to 10% of its annual turnover. The order remains in effect until the full antitrust case concludes.
When asked, the ChatGPT bot says it runs on GPT-5.5, though OpenAI has not documented that version publicly. Image generation requests appear to route through the company's gpt-image-2 system, as first reported by The Decoder.
Users can also link their WhatsApp identity to a ChatGPT account for session context and message history. For Windows users, the integration is especially smooth. WhatsApp Web and the Microsoft Store app sync conversation threads across devices, letting users start a ChatGPT prompt on their phone and continue on a desktop without switching tools.
Some users have reported WhatsApp account suspensions after receiving ChatGPT messages. The cause is unconfirmed, and neither Meta nor OpenAI has commented.
Notebookcheck noted the issue may stem from spam detection or verification problems.
OpenAI is also expanding to other messaging platforms. It launched a ChatGPT bot on South Korea's KakaoTalk on June 16 and has been integrating tools into Viber for translation, summarization, and image remixing across select markets.
