Meta in Italy will charge companies to keep their chatbots on WhatsApp, what changes
As of 16 February, companies wishing to maintain their chatbot within WhatsApp in Italy will have to pay a fee per Meta for each response generated
In Italy, in a couple of weeks, the company that wants to keep a chatbot inside WhatsApp that is not MetaAI will have to pay. To understand the news properly, let us go in order. Meta, the company that owns WhatsApp, launched Meta Ai in Europe in March 2025. It is an Ai chatbot powered by LLaMA, the Large language model developed by Meta. The service where it has been most visibly, and somewhat intrusively, integrated is WhatsApp.
Before Meta AI came along, WhatsApp's corporate accounts could run automated bots, including chatbots with external LLMs such as ChatGpt. Then Meta said stop, explaining that the APIs (developer platforms) were intended for enterprise chatbots but simpler than the generative AI ones we are used to today. They demanded too much bandwidth and created confusion within the app.
On 24 December, the Competition and Market Authority asked the technology giant to suspend the ban it had imposed on third-party chatbots in Italy. The intervention forced Meta to reopen access in our country, but with a new model that shifts part of the platform management costs onto developers.
"The emergence of artificial intelligence chatbots on our Business Api has put pressure on our systems that were not designed to support this type of use. The Italian Authority assumes that WhatsApp is, to some extent, a de facto app store. The market access channels for AI companies are the app stores, their websites and industry partnerships, not the WhatsApp Business platform. We will appeal,' Meta explained after the Antitrust decision.
After months of tension with the Authority, comes Meta's new policy: as of 16 February, companies that want to keep their artificial intelligence platforms on the app must pay for each response generated by automated bots. "Where we are legally obliged to provide AI chatbots via WhatsApp's corporate Api, we are introducing pricing for companies that choose to use our platform to provide such services," said a Meta spokesperson as reported by Ansa.
