The most important AI story of late 2025 isn’t a benchmark score or a flashy demo. It’s the slow, structural rewrite of who gets to set the rules for AI products and whether those rules become global by default.
This week, Italy’s antitrust watchdog (AGCM) ordered Meta to suspend certain WhatsApp business-platform terms that regulators suspect could block rival AI chatbots from accessing the WhatsApp ecosystem. The watchdog framed it as a potential abuse of dominance that could restrict market access and consumer choice in the chatbot market. Meta said it plans to appeal.
Zoom out and the case reads like a preview of “AI competition policy” in the 2026 era. Chatbots are no longer just apps; they’re becoming interfaces the front door to customer service, shopping, scheduling, and business messaging. If one company controls a dominant messaging platform and then sets contractual rules that decide which AI assistants can (or can’t) plug into that platform, regulators see a classic gatekeeper problem only now the gatekeeper is mediating an AI layer, not just ad inventory or payments.
Two details make the WhatsApp fight bigger than Italy.
First, the Italian investigation isn’t happening in isolation. Reuters reports the European Commission is running a parallel probe and coordinating with Italy. Coordination matters because it signals a model: national regulators can move fast and build a record, while Brussels shapes a cross-border enforcement narrative.
Second, the U.S.–EU relationship around tech regulation is getting spiky. The Guardian reports the Trump administration imposed visa bans on several European figures associated with developing and promoting the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), escalating a dispute over whether EU digital rules amount to “extraterritorial censorship.” European leaders condemned the bans as coercive and an attack on EU sovereignty.
If you’re a product manager inside a global platform company, you can feel the squeeze: Europe is using regulation to force openness, risk controls, and accountability; Washington is increasingly framing those same moves as political aggression against U.S. firms. In the middle are users who mostly just want chat apps and assistants that work and don’t trap them.
What’s new is how AI changes the stakes. Traditional platform regulation often focused on distribution: app stores, search rankings, ad auctions. AI adds two more choke points:
- The “assistant slot”: which AI gets to be the default helper inside a platform (messaging, browsers, phones).
- The “data and tool slot”: which AI gets access to APIs, business messaging, customer histories, scheduling tools.
In older internet eras, being “default” was huge. In an AI-first era, being the assistant that can act inside your daily tools could be even bigger—because the assistant becomes habit-forming infrastructure.
That’s why Italy’s WhatsApp order is a signal flare. Even if it’s later narrowed or overturned, it sketches a regulatory posture: don’t let dominant platforms pick AI winners behind contractual walls.
Meanwhile, Europe’s crackdown is widening beyond one case. Euronews summarized how EU regulators stepped up actions against major tech firms in 2025 using newer digital rules aimed at curbing platform power and protecting consumers. Whether you agree with the EU approach or not, the direction is consistent: digital markets are being treated like essential infrastructure.
Now layer in a third actor: China. The Wall Street Journal reports China is tightening ideological and compliance control over AI systems, requiring traceability and labeling and mandating tests to ensure politically sensitive outputs are filtered. In other words, China’s AI governance isn’t framed primarily as competition policy or consumer safety. It’s framed as regime stability plus strategic industrial policy.
Put the three together and you get the 2025 reality: AI governance is splitting into blocs.
- EU: competition + platform accountability (open access, anti-lock-in, safety duties).
- U.S.: pro-innovation posture mixed with geopolitical retaliation threats when allies regulate U.S. firms.
- China: centralized oversight and ideological constraints baked into model deployment.
For companies, this becomes less about “what’s legal” and more about “what architecture survives.” The safest architecture in 2026 will likely be modular: assistants that can swap models, compliance layers that can adapt by region, and clear documentation about why a tool or API is limited in one jurisdiction but open in another.
For users, the risk is a fragmented experience: your WhatsApp may behave differently depending on where you live; your assistant may be available but neutered; your preferred chatbot may be blocked from your preferred messaging app. That’s the cost of a world where AI is no longer a novelty it’s a contested layer of the economy.
The WhatsApp case is also a reminder that “AI regulation” doesn’t only mean AI-specific laws. It often arrives through old legal machinery competition law, consumer protection, platform liability applied to new AI behaviors. The rules aren’t just being written in parliaments. They’re being written in injunctions, investigations, and contract clauses.
The next year’s question isn’t whether regulation will shape AI. It already is. The question is whether regulators can enforce openness without breaking user experience and whether platforms can comply without turning “AI assistants” into gated communities.