Meta-owned chat app WhatsApp changed its business API policy this week to ban general-purpose chatbots from its platform. The move will likely affect WhatsApp-based assistants of companies like OpenAI, Perplexity, Khosla Ventures-backed Luzia, and General Catalyst-backed Poke.

The company has added a new section to address “AI providers” in its business API terms, focusing on general-purpose chatbots. The terms, which will go into effect on January 15, 2026, say that Meta won’t allow AI model providers to distribute their AI assistants on WhatsApp.

Providers and developers of artificial intelligence or machine learning technologies, including but not limited to large language models, generative artificial intelligence platforms, general-purpose artificial intelligence assistants, or similar technologies as determined by Meta in its sole discretion (“AI Providers”), are strictly prohibited from accessing or using the WhatsApp Business Solution, whether directly or indirectly, for the purposes of providing, delivering, offering, selling, or otherwise making available such technologies when such technologies are the primary (rather than incidental or ancillary) functionality being made available for use, as determined by Meta in its sole discretion.

Meta confirmed this move to TechCrunch and specified that this move doesn’t affect businesses that are using AI to serve customers on WhatsApp. For instance, a travel company running a bot for customer service won’t be barred from the service.

Meta’s rationale behind this move is that WhatsApp Business API is designed for businesses serving customers rather than acting as a platform for chatbot distribution. The company said that while it built the API for business-to-business use cases, in recent months, it saw an unanticipated use case of serving general-purpose chatbots.

“The purpose of the WhatsApp Business API is to help businesses provide customer support and send relevant updates. Our focus is on supporting the tens of thousands of businesses who are building these experiences on WhatsApp,” a Meta spokesperson said in a comment to TechCrunch.

Meta said that the new chatbot use cases placed a lot of burden on its system with increased message volume and required a different kind of support, which the company wasn’t ready for. The company is banning use cases that fall outside “the intended design and strategic focus” of the API.

The move will effectively make WhatsApp unavailable as a platform to distribute AI solutions like assistants or agents. It also means Meta AI is the only assistant available on the chat app.

Last year, OpenAI launched ChatGPT on WhatsApp, and earlier this year, Perplexity launched its own bot on the chat app to tap into the user base of more than 3 billion people. Both of the bots could answer queries, understand media files, answer questions about them, reply to voice notes, and generate images. This likely generated a lot of message volume.

However, there was a bigger issue for Meta. WhatsApp’s Business API is one of the primary ways the chat app makes money. It charges businesses based on different message templates like marketing, utility, authentication, and support. As there wasn’t any provision for chatbots in this API design, WhatsApp wasn’t able to charge them.

During Meta’s Q1 2025 earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg pointed out that business messaging is a big opportunity for the company to bring in revenue.

“Right now, the vast majority of our business is advertising in feeds on Facebook and Instagram,” he said. “But WhatsApp now has more than 3 billion monthly [active users], with more than 100 million people in the US and growing quickly there. Messenger is also used by more than a billion people each month, and there are now as many messages sent each day on Instagram as there are on Messenger. Business messaging should be the next pillar of our business.”

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