Meta-owned chat app WhatsApp modified its enterprise API coverage this week to ban general-purpose chatbots from its platform. The transfer will doubtless have an effect on WhatsApp-based assistants of corporations like OpenAI, Perplexity, Khosla Ventures-backed Luzia, and Common Catalyst-backed Poke.
The corporate has added a brand new part to handle “AI suppliers” in its enterprise API phrases, specializing in general-purpose chatbots. The phrases, which can go into impact on January 15, 2026, say that Meta gained’t permit AI mannequin suppliers to distribute their AI assistants on WhatsApp.
Suppliers and builders of synthetic intelligence or machine studying applied sciences, together with however not restricted to massive language fashions, generative synthetic intelligence platforms, general-purpose synthetic intelligence assistants, or related applied sciences as decided by Meta in its sole discretion (“AI Suppliers”), are strictly prohibited from accessing or utilizing the WhatsApp Enterprise Answer, whether or not immediately or not directly, for the needs of offering, delivering, providing, promoting, or in any other case making obtainable such applied sciences when such applied sciences are the first (slightly than incidental or ancillary) performance being made obtainable to be used, as decided by Meta in its sole discretion.
Meta confrimed this transfer to TechCrunch and specified that this transfer doesn’t have an effect on companies which are utilizing AI to serve clients on WhatsApp. As an example, a journey firm working a bot for customer support gained’t be barred from the service.
The corporate’s rationale behind this transfer is that WhatsApp Enterprise API is designed for companies serving clients slightly than appearing as a platform for chatbot distribution. The corporate stated that whereas it constructed the API for these use instances, in latest months, it noticed an unanticipated use case of serving general-purpose chatbots.
“The aim of the WhatsApp Enterprise API is to assist companies present buyer help and ship related updates. Our focus is on supporting the tens of hundreds of companies who’re constructing these experiences on WhatsApp,” a Meta spokesperson stated in a remark to TechCrunch.
Meta stated that the brand new chatbot use instances put a number of burden on its system with elevated message quantity and required a distinct sort of help, which the corporate wasn’t prepared for. The corporate is banning use instances that falls exterior “the meant design and strategic focus” of the API.
The transfer will successfully make WhatsApp moot as a platform to distribute AI options like assistants or brokers. It additionally means Meta AI is the one assistant obtainable on the chat app.
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Final 12 months, OpenAI launched ChatGPT on WhatsApp, and earlier this 12 months, Perplexity launched its personal bot on the chat app to faucet into the person base of greater than 3 billion folks. Each of the bots might reply queries, perceive media information, reply questions on them, reply to voice notes, and generate photos. This doubtless generated a number of message quantity.
Nevertheless, there was an even bigger subject for Meta. WhatsApp’s Enterprise API is among the main methods the chat app makes cash. It prices companies based mostly on totally different message templates like advertising and marketing, utility, authentication, and help. As there wasn’t any provision for chatbots on this API design, WhatsApp wasn’t capable of cost them.
Throughout Meta’s Q1 2025 earnings calls, Mark Zuckerberg identified that enterprise messaging is an enormous alternative for the corporate the usher in income.
“Proper now, the overwhelming majority of our enterprise is promoting in feeds on Fb and Instagram,” he stated. “However WhatsApp now has greater than 3 billion month-to-month [active users], with greater than 100 million folks within the US and rising rapidly there. Messenger can be utilized by greater than a billion folks every month, and there are actually as many messages despatched every day on Instagram as there are on Messenger. Enterprise messaging needs to be the following pillar of our enterprise.”
