The City of Brussels is planning a new antitrust investigation into Meta over the rollout of artificial intelligence (AI) features within WhatsApp, the EU’s latest challenge to Big Tech.
The European Commission was due to launch an investigation into how the Silicon Valley company integrated its “meta-AI” system into its popular messaging service earlier this year, two officials told the Financial Times.
The EU’s top antitrust enforcement agency is expected to announce its investigation in the coming days, but the timing is still subject to change, the people said.
The new probe will fall under traditional antitrust laws, rather than the Digital Markets Act (DMA), a landmark EU law aimed at countering the dominance of big online platforms, but which has been a particular focus of the Trump administration’s attacks.
Meta rolled out its AI capabilities to WhatsApp across European countries in March, after initially delaying the rollout citing the region’s “complex regulatory regime.”
The feature is designed as an AI assistant within the app’s chat feature that can suggest prompts and additional text to fill out your message.
Italian antitrust authorities are already investigating Meta for allegedly using its dominant position to integrate AI into WhatsApp without users’ consent.
Last month, Italian authorities expanded their investigation into new conditions and new AI features for the WhatsApp Business messaging service, claiming that the changes “could restrict production, market access and technological development in the market for AI chatbot services.”
A Meta spokesperson declined to comment on the upcoming EU investigation and referred to an earlier statement about the Italian investigation, which was rejected as “baseless”.
“The recent updates do not affect the tens of thousands of businesses that provide customer support and send relevant updates, or businesses that use selected AI assistants to chat with customers,” Mehta said.
The investigation in Europe follows the recent opening of DMA investigations into Google’s parent company Alphabet over the ranking of news organizations in search results, and Amazon and Microsoft over cloud computing services.
The commission stressed that it will continue to tighten digital regulations despite the risk of potential retaliation by the US government and regular criticism from the US.
Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg has lobbied the Trump administration against EU regulations, arguing the company is a burden that will leave it behind the U.S. and China in the AI race.
President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance have said they oppose regulations targeting major U.S. technology companies in the wake of their meeting with Zuckerberg and his lobbyists. Last month, US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said during a visit to Brussels that the EU needs to ease its tech regulations.
The commission’s move also comes weeks after Mehta won a U.S. antitrust lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission that forced the $1.6 trillion company to reverse its acquisitions of WhatsApp and photo app Instagram.
The judge in the US case ruled that the company does not hold monopoly power because it competes with services such as Google’s YouTube and ByteDance’s TikTok.
The commission declined to comment. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2025
