ChatGPT Crawls Back to WhatsApp After EU Slaps Meta

Six months after Meta kicked it off, ChatGPT is back on WhatsApp across the European Economic Area — and it's free, with no account required. The bot vanished on January 15, 2026, when Meta rewrote its WhatsApp Business API terms to ban generic AI chatbots. The reversal didn't come from goodwill: the European Commission stepped in, ruling Meta was choking third-party access to favor its own Meta AI assistant.

OpenAI isn't stopping at WhatsApp. ChatGPT is also expanding to Kakao (South Korea) and Viber in select markets — part of a clear play to meet users inside the messaging apps they already live in, rather than dragging them to a standalone app. Meta, for its part, is now opening WhatsApp to rival chatbots in Europe — reportedly for a fee.

The obvious next question: when does Codex show up in the chat thread too?

Why it matters: Regulators, not platforms, are deciding where AI assistants get to live — and that's reshaping the distribution war.