Following Italy, WhatsApp exempts Brazil from a competing ban on chatbots

WhatsApp is allowing AI service 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 prevents third-party general-purpose chatbots from being offered on the app via its business API.

Under the new policy, the company provides a 90-day grace period starting January 15 for developers and artificial intelligence service providers, obligating them to stop responding to user inquiries on the chat application, and notifying users that their chat programs will not work on WhatsApp.

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

“The requirement to stop responding to user inquiries and implement pre-approved auto-reply language (described below) before January 15, 2026, no longer applies when messaging people using the Brazilian country code (+55),” the notice said.

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

This policy, which goes into effect today, affects general-purpose chatbots such as ChatGPT and Grok on the platform. Notably, the policy does not prevent companies from providing customer service via bots within WhatsApp to their customers.

The Brazilian competition agency said in its notice that it will investigate whether Meta’s terms exclude competitors and unjustifiably favor Meta AI, the company’s chatbot offered on WhatsApp.

Meta previously offered a similar exemption to users in Italy after the country’s competition agency objected to the policy in December. Separately, the European Union has also opened an antitrust investigation into the new rules.

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

“These claims are fundamentally flawed,” a WhatsApp spokesperson said in response to the CADE investigation on Tuesday. “The emergence of AI chatbots on our business API has put pressure on our systems that were not designed to support them. This logic assumes that WhatsApp is more or less a physical app store. The path to market for AI companies is the app stores themselves, their websites and industry partnerships; not the WhatsApp Business platform.”