ChatGPT Returns to WhatsApp in Europe
The Decoder
ChatGPT is back on WhatsApp in Europe, five months after Meta booted it off. Only there thanks to a Brussels ultimatum, not Meta's goodwill.
Based on reporting by The Decoder — read the original for the full story.
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OpenAI's chatbot has quietly slipped back into WhatsApp, but only for people living in the European Economic Area. Since July 13, anyone in the EU's 27 member states, plus Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein, can message 1-800-CHATGPT and get replies without creating an account. Text, images, voice notes, even image generation all work, and in a pile of languages.
The timing isn't a coincidence. Meta pulled ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Perplexity off WhatsApp back in January after rewriting its business terms, leaving its own Meta AI as the only assistant standing. That didn't sit well with European regulators. In June, the European Commission ordered interim measures forcing Meta to let rivals back in, and for free. OpenAI's return to the platform is the direct result of that order, not some change of heart from Meta.
Under the hood, the bot claims to be running on GPT-5.5, though the sharpness of its image outputs suggests those requests are quietly handed off to gpt-image-2. There's also an option to link your WhatsApp number to an existing ChatGPT account, which pulls in your chat history and context from other OpenAI products. What's murkier is what happens if you don't link anything. Nobody outside OpenAI seems to know the usage caps for anonymous users, and there's a reasonable chance some prompts get routed to cheaper, older models to keep costs down.
Europe isn't the only new stop on ChatGPT's messaging tour. OpenAI is simultaneously rolling the assistant out on Kakao in South Korea and Viber in other regions, a sign that meeting people inside the apps they already use daily is becoming as important to OpenAI as the ChatGPT app itself. Getting back onto WhatsApp, though, required a regulatory shove that most AI companies don't get.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
I run TLDRocket because I think the AI story that matters most right now isn't model size, it's who controls distribution, and this is a textbook case. Meta didn't let OpenAI back on WhatsApp because it suddenly loves competition; Brussels made it happen. That's the EU tech playbook working exactly as intended, and I'll take a clunky interim order over another gatekeeper deciding which assistant 2 billion people are allowed to talk to.
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