EU to launch antitrust investigation into Meta over AI in WhatsApp - FT

The European Union is preparing new proceedings against Meta Platforms over the introduction of artificial intelligence features in the WhatsApp messenger. The British Financial Times reported on the European Commission's plans to launch a probe in the near future, citing two anonymous officials. The antitrust case may become a new challenge for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has made expansion in the AI market a priority for the company.

The European Commission, the EU's main antitrust authority, plans to announce the launch of an investigation into Meta in the coming days, although the timing could still shift, FT sources say. According to them, Brussels intends to find out whether the US company violated competition rules when it launched a virtual assistant based on the chatbot Llama in the WhatsApp app. The investigation will be conducted under traditional EU antitrust law, rather than under the recently adopted Digital Markets Act (DMA), which is used to control the activities of technology giants, the publication emphasizes.

This is not the first complaint from European regulators over the AI features that Meta began rolling out on WhatsApp in March 2025 - after an initial delay caused by the region's "complex regulatory system." Back in July, Italy's antitrust authority launched an investigation on suspicion that Meta was using its market power to promote its own tools, Reuters notes. In November, the Italian regulator expanded the probe to see if Meta abused its dominant position by blocking competing chatbots from accessing WhatsApp.

A Meta spokesman declined to comment to the FT on the impending EU investigation and referred to an earlier statement on the Italian investigation, which the company rejected as "unfounded".

In mid-November, Meta won a trial in a US antitrust case initiated by the Federal Trade Commission back in 2020. The US regulator tried to force Meta to sell Instagram and WhatsApp. However, the judge ruled that Meta does not have a monopoly as it has to compete with Google's YouTube and Bytedance's TikTok.

Zuckerberg has made AI a priority for the company in 2025 in order to keep up with the market leaders - OpenAI and Google. Meta's founder is personally involved in negotiations with potential employees and schedules meetings himself. In June, he restructured the AI teams to focus on developing "superintelligence." As part of its updated strategy, Meta intends to invest tens of billions of dollars in AI projects in 2025 and hundreds of billions in the coming years.

Shares of Meta Platforms traded in the morning of December 4 in the plus by 0.1% on the over-the-counter platform Blue Ocean ATS after a decline of 1.2% at the end of the last trading session of Nasdaq. Since the beginning of 2025, the tech giant's shares have gained 9.2%, while the U.S. S&P 500 index has added more than 15% over the same period.

Over the past three months, the consensus on Wall Street regarding Meta has become even more "bullish": the advice to sell the securities has completely disappeared from the recommendations (previously there was one "bear"), and the number of neutral assessments (Hold) has decreased from 9 to 7. Now the absolute majority of analysts - 62 people - recommend the stock to buy. The average target price of $839.4 implies growth of quotations by 31%.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor