WhatsApp opens the door to rivals: chatbots from third-party AI companies are coming to Brazil

Just yesterday, WhatsApp was closed territory for Meta AI — Mark Zuckerberg's company's own assistant. Today, the walls are beginning to crumble. Meta announced that competing AI companies will have the opportunity to place their chatbots in WhatsApp for users in Brazil. This happened just a day after a similar decision for the European market, and the speed with which the company is scaling this new policy says a lot.

To understand the significance of this step, we need to recall the context. In Europe, Meta's decision was in many ways forced — the Digital Markets Act (DMA) requires the largest technology platforms to ensure interoperability and not discriminate against competitors. WhatsApp, with its status as a "gatekeeper," fell under these regulations, and allowing third-party AI bots became a logical response to regulatory pressure. But Brazil is a completely different story. Here there is no equivalent of the DMA, no strict requirements for platform openness. This means Meta is taking this step voluntarily, guided by strategic rather than legal motives.

Brazil is the world's second-largest WhatsApp market after India. The messenger has long transcended its role as a simple communication tool: business is conducted through it, people book appointments with doctors, make purchases, and interact with government services. By various estimates, WhatsApp is installed on the smartphones of more than 93% of Brazilians, and for a significant portion of the population, it is practically synonymous with the internet. Opening such an audience to third-party AI companies is not just a gesture of goodwill, but the creation of a potentially giant artificial intelligence marketplace.

The mechanics so far look as follows: AI companies will be able to offer their chatbots within WhatsApp on a paid basis. Meta does not disclose pricing details, but the very fact of monetization through allowing competitors is a fundamentally new business model for the company. Rather than trying to beat everyone with their own Meta AI, Zuckerberg seems to be betting on a platform approach: let WhatsApp become something like an App Store for AI assistants, and Meta will earn from each one. This resembles the classic strategy that once made Apple and Google dominant forces in the mobile ecosystem.

For competitors — whether OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, or regional AI startups — access to WhatsApp's audience opens enormous opportunities. It's one thing to convince a user to download a separate application or visit a website, and quite another to offer an AI assistant directly in a messenger that a person uses dozens of times a day. The barrier to entry drops radically, and this is exactly what the AI industry needs at this stage, when the technology still remains a niche tool for a technically savvy audience.

However, there are serious questions. How will Meta moderate third-party bots? Who bears responsibility for hallucinations and errors of an AI assistant operating inside WhatsApp? How will the issue of user data be resolved — since WhatsApp has traditionally been positioned as a platform with end-to-end encryption? Interaction with an AI bot by definition implies the transfer of data to a third party, and this could raise justified concerns among users and regulators. In Brazil, where its own personal data protection law (LGPD) is in effect, these questions will be particularly acute.

There is also a competitive angle. By allowing third-party players, Meta simultaneously gains invaluable data about which AI services are in demand, how users interact with them, and where unmet needs exist. This information could be used to develop Meta's own AI — a classic tactic of a platform player, which was once criticized against Amazon for using third-party seller data on its marketplace.

What we are witnessing is the potential birth of a new type of digital platform. If the experiment in Europe and Brazil proves successful, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and other major WhatsApp markets are surely next in line. And this is no longer just a new feature in a messenger — this is a fundamental shift in how billions of people will gain access to artificial intelligence. Not through specialized applications and not through search engines, but through that very messenger in which they already spend a significant portion of their day. Meta may have found a way to turn regulatory pressure into a strategic advantage — and this, perhaps, is the most interesting twist in this entire story.