Five working days. That’s all Meta has.
The European Commission issued interim antitrust measures against Meta on June 9–10, 2026, ordering the company to reinstate free access to the WhatsApp for Business API for third-party general-purpose AI assistants. The legal basis: Article 102 TFEU and Article 54 of the EEA Agreement. The Commission found that Meta holds a dominant position in the EEA-wide consumer communications application market and that its API restrictions constituted an abuse of that position.
The sequence matters. On October 15, 2025, Meta banned third-party general-purpose AI assistants from the WhatsApp for Business API outright. According to the Commission’s decision and complainant counsel Geradin Partners – which represents Interaction Company, the firm that filed the original complaint, Meta subsequently replaced the outright ban with an API access fee that the Commission determined was commercially prohibitive and effectively equivalent to a ban. The complaint argues the revised fee structure preserved the same competitive exclusion the outright ban had created.
The five-day reinstatement window is the headline. Meta must restore the terms and conditions that were in place before October 15, 2025, the date the original ban took effect. The Case AT.41034 decision leaves no room for a phased rollout or negotiated alternative. The pre-ban terms return, or the Commission escalates.
Timeline
What does escalation look like? The statutory maximum penalty under EU competition law is 10% of Meta’s global annual turnover, a figure that runs well into the billions. That’s the ceiling, not an assessed fine. But the five-day window signals that the Commission isn’t treating this as a slow-moving investigation. Interim measures under Regulation 1/2003 are a rarely used authority. The Commission invoked them here because, in its assessment, competitive harm in AI markets couldn’t wait for a full investigation to conclude.
The catch is that Meta has options. The company can comply by the deadline, appeal the interim measures order, or pursue some combination of compliance and legal challenge. Appeals don’t automatically suspend interim measures in EU competition law. Compliance while contesting the decision is the more common path for large platforms, it preserves the appeal and avoids daily penalty exposure.
For compliance teams at platform companies operating in Europe, the real question is what this order reveals about the Commission’s enforcement posture toward API-gated AI features. The Commission didn’t wait for the AI Act. It didn’t use DMA gatekeeper mechanisms. It reached for antitrust law, the oldest competition enforcement tool in the EU’s toolkit, and applied it to an AI market access dispute in real time.
Any company with a dominant platform, an AI feature set, and an API that developers depend on is now looking at a cleaner precedent. The Commission has demonstrated that access restrictions framed as policy or pricing can be recharacterized as abuse of dominance if the effect is to lock competing AI providers out of a platform where they’d otherwise operate.
Who This Affects
The five-day window expires on or around June 15–17, 2026. Human verification of the exact calendar date against the official Commission decision document is required before any action is taken – working-day calculations depend on the precise decision date and applicable EU calendar.
⚠️ Escalation flag: Compliance teams should verify the exact deadline against the official Case AT.41034 decision document before taking or advising any action. The date range above is derived from a five-working-day calculation; it is not the Commission’s stated calendar date.