Brazil's competition watchdog, CADE, has ordered Meta to suspend a new WhatsApp policy that blocks third-party artificial intelligence chatbots from its business platform. The regulator has also initiated an investigation into whether the policy is anti-competitive, following complaints from AI chatbot providers who claim the move unfairly favors Meta’s own AI assistant.
Meta's updated terms of service were announced in October 2025 and were set to be fully enforced by January 15, 2026. A company spokesperson called the allegations "fundamentally wrong," arguing that the platform was not designed for the high volume of use from these AI services, which overloads its systems. The action in Brazil follows a similar antitrust probe by Italian authorities into the same policy.