After Italy, WhatsApp excludes Brazil from rival chatbot ban

WhatsApp is allowing AI providers to continue offering their chatbots to users with Brazilian phone numbers, days after the country’s competition regulator ordered the company to suspend its new policy that bars third-party, general-purpose chatbots from being offered on the app via its business API.

Under the new policy, the company is providing a 90-day grace period starting January 15 to developers and AI providers, mandating them to cease responding to user queries on the chat app, and notify users that their chatbots won’t work on WhatsApp.

Now, Meta told developers that they don’t have to notify users with Brazilian phone numbers (with code +55) of any changes or cease offering their services, per a notice to AI providers seen by TechCrunch.

“The requirement to cease responding to user queries and implement pre-approved auto-reply language (mentioned below) before January 15, 2026, no longer applies when messaging people with a Brazil country code (+55),” the notice reads.

WhatsApp did not immediately respond to a query seeking to confirm the decision.

The policy, which goes into effect from today, impacts general-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT and Grok on the platform. Notably, the policy does not stop businesses from providing customer service via bots within WhatsApp to their customers.

In its notice, Brazil’s competition agency said it would investigate if Meta’s terms are exclusionary to competitors and unduly favor Meta AI, the company’s chatbot that’s offered on WhatsApp.

Meta has previously provided a similar exemption to users in Italy after the country’s competition agency took issue with the policy in December. Separately, the EU has also opened an antitrust investigation into the new rules.

The company has consistently maintained that AI chatbots are straining its systems that were designed for different uses of its business API. Meta has even said in the past that people who want to use different chatbots can do so outside WhatsApp.

“These claims are fundamentally flawed,” a WhatsApp spokesperson said in response to CADE’s probe on Tuesday. “The emergence of AI chatbots on our Business API put a strain on our systems that they were not designed to support. This logic assumes WhatsApp is somehow a de facto app store. The route to market for AI companies is the app stores themselves, their websites and industry partnerships; not the WhatsApp Business Platform.”