WhatsApp is allowing AI providers to continue offering chatbots to users with Brazilian phone numbers, days after the country’s competition regulator. ordered the company to suspend a new policy that prevents third-party, general-purpose chatbots from being offered in apps through business APIs.
In the new policy, the company provides a 90-day grace period from January 15 for AI developers and providers, orders them to stop responding to user queries in the chat app, and informs users that chatbots cannot be used on WhatsApp.
Currently, Meta tells developers that they do not have to notify users with Brazilian phone numbers (with the +55 code) of any changes or stop providing services, per the notification to the AI provider seen by TechCrunch.
“The requirement to stop responding to user queries and to apply the approved automatic reply language (mentioned below) before January 15, 2026, no longer applies when sending messages with people using the Brazilian country code (+55),” the notice said.
WhatsApp did not immediately respond to inquiries to confirm the decision.
Wisdom, which starting todayaffect general purpose chatbots like ChatGPT and Grok on the platform. In particular, the policy does not prevent businesses from providing customer service through bots on WhatsApp to customers.
In the news, Brazil’s competition agency said it would investigate if Meta’s requirements were exclusivity for competitors and did not favor Meta AI, the company’s chatbot offered on WhatsApp.
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Meta has previously provided a similar exception for users in Italy after The state competition agency took issue with the policy in December. Separately, the EU has also opened up antitrust investigation into the new rules.
The company has consistently maintained that AI chatbots are disrupting systems designed for multiple uses of business APIs. Meta has even said before that people who want to use different chatbots can do so outside of WhatsApp.
“The claim is fundamentally flawed,” a WhatsApp spokesperson said in response to the CADE investigation on Tuesday. “The emergence of AI chatbots in our Business API leads to a system that was not designed to support it. This logic considers WhatsApp a de facto app store. The route to market for AI companies is the app store itself, websites and industry partnerships; not the WhatsApp Business Platform.”