TL;DR
Meta carved out a Brazil exemption from its third-party chatbot ban on WhatsApp Business API following antitrust pressure, mirroring Italy's earlier exception.
Key Points
- 90-day grace period starts January 15, 2026 for global developers; Brazil (+55) excluded from compliance requirements
- Policy targets general-purpose chatbots (ChatGPT, Grok) but preserves customer service bots for business use
- Brazil's CADE competition agency investigating if Meta's terms unfairly favor Meta AI over competitors
- Meta claims AI chatbots strain systems designed for different uses; similar exemption already granted to Italy in December
Why It Matters
This demonstrates how regional regulatory pressure can fragment API policies across jurisdictions, forcing developers to maintain country-specific logic. For DevOps and integration engineers, it signals that WhatsApp Business API strategies need geo-aware compliance handling, while the broader antitrust scrutiny hints at potential policy reversals if competition agencies find exclusionary practices.
Source: techcrunch.com