MENLO PARK, CA — Meta Platforms announced Tuesday that it will officially block ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot from its WhatsApp platform, citing a critical need to safeguard the messaging ecosystem from external tools that users were voluntarily choosing to use.

The policy update, which classifies non-Meta AI chatbots as “unauthorized interaction vectors,” will force millions of businesses to stop using the tools they had integrated for customer support and coding assistance. “We identified a troubling trend where users were solving problems efficiently using third-party large language models,” said Sarah Kim, Vice President of Platform Integrity at Meta. “This created a fragmented experience. By removing the option to use the AI you prefer, we are streamlining your workflow into a single, cohesive path that leads directly to Meta AI, regardless of whether it can answer your question.”

Small business owners who relied on the integrations for daily operations expressed confusion over the sudden eviction of their primary productivity tools. “We view this as an ecosystem alignment strategy,” explained Marcus Chen, Director of Strategic Synergy. “Allowing OpenAI to process your queries represented a significant data leakage risk. When you use ChatGPT, that data leaves our walled garden. When you use Meta AI, that data stays safely within our servers, where it can be properly categorized, analyzed, and leveraged to serve you hyper-targeted advertisements for products you mentioned in confidence.”

Chen noted that while the transition might be jarring, Meta AI offers “comparable features,” such as the ability to generate photorealistic images of celebrities eating spaghetti, which he argued was functionally identical to Copilot’s ability to debug Python scripts. “It is about curating the quality of the conversation,” Chen added. “We simply cannot verify the safety of an answer if we didn’t generate it ourselves.”

At press time, Meta was reportedly finalizing a new Terms of Service update that would automatically flag messages containing the word “Google” as potential spam.

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