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Meta Faces Italian Competition Investigation Over WhatsApp AI Chatbot 

The Meta logo is seen in this illustration taken, August 22, 2022. (Reuters)
The Meta logo is seen in this illustration taken, August 22, 2022. (Reuters)
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Meta Faces Italian Competition Investigation Over WhatsApp AI Chatbot 

The Meta logo is seen in this illustration taken, August 22, 2022. (Reuters)
The Meta logo is seen in this illustration taken, August 22, 2022. (Reuters)

Italy's antitrust authority said on Wednesday it had launched an investigation into Meta Platforms over allegations the company abused its dominant position by installing its artificial intelligence tool on messaging service WhatsApp.

The watchdog said Meta may have violated European Union competition rules by integrating its Meta AI assistant into WhatsApp without user consent, a move that might harm its competitors.

The company said it was cooperating with the Rome-based authority and that its AI service benefited customers.

“Offering free access to our AI features in WhatsApp gives millions of Italians the choice to use AI in a place they already know, trust and understand,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

The authority, known as AGCM, said it acted "in close cooperation with the relevant offices of the European Commission".

Meta AI, which provides chatbot-style responses and virtual assistant functions, has been part of WhatsApp's interface since March 2025, and was included in the app's search bar, the authority said.

The regulator said inclusion could unfairly steer users toward Meta's AI services, potentially harming competitors and locking users into the platform.

"By pairing Meta AI with WhatsApp, Meta appears to be able to steer its user base into the new market not through merit-based competition, but by 'forcing' users to accept the availability of two distinct services, potentially harming competing services", the authority said.

Companies that breach EU competition rules by abusing a dominant position can be fined up to 10% of their worldwide turnover.

The authority said its officials carried out investigations at the offices of Meta’s Italian subsidiary with the assistance of Italy's tax police special antitrust unit.

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Technology

China's Tencent Says AI Agents Showed Unintended Browsing Behavior

FILE PHOTO: The Tencent logo at the company's headquarters during a government‑organised media trip in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, China, April 17, 2026. REUTERS/Go Nakamura/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: The Tencent logo at the company's headquarters during a government‑organised media trip in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, China, April 17, 2026. REUTERS/Go Nakamura/File Photo
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China's Tencent Says AI Agents Showed Unintended Browsing Behavior

FILE PHOTO: The Tencent logo at the company's headquarters during a government‑organised media trip in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, China, April 17, 2026. REUTERS/Go Nakamura/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: The Tencent logo at the company's headquarters during a government‑organised media trip in Shenzhen, Guangdong province, China, April 17, 2026. REUTERS/Go Nakamura/File Photo

Tencent said on Friday that AI agents used to evaluate third-party models displayed web-browsing behavior not intended by the tech giant, in what appears to be the first known incident of rogue agent actions acknowledged by a major Chinese company.

The statement followed a report by AI-safety research group Swarmchasers on Wednesday, which said "rogue" agents running on infrastructure it linked to Tencent Cloud made repeated attempts between September 28 and October 8 to retrieve information from Alibaba's Amap, China's equivalent to Google Maps.

Tencent Hunyuan, the company's artificial ⁠intelligence unit, said in ⁠a post on X that the activity did not originate from its Hunyuan models. Its review found no evidence of deliberate targeting or coordination, Reuters quoted it as saying.

The Swarmchasers researchers said the agents sought information such as the commonly used entrances at Chinese parks, museums and zoos.

The actions are not as egregious as those disclosed by US AI companies which include the hack of ⁠open-source platform Hugging Face by an OpenAI agent and the lodging of a fake homicide tip by an Anthropic agent.

But the disclosure underscores research that shows Chinese AI agents can also misrepresent their identity, conceal failures and try to circumvent testing controls.

Tencent said it took the findings very seriously and was strengthening network access controls and agent monitoring.

Hunyuan is one of China's leading AI model developers, competing with in-house teams at rivals such as Alibaba and ByteDance. ByteDance this week announced the creation of a new unit focused on AI model and agent safety.

Swarmchasers said it used the ⁠word "rogue" to ⁠describe agents taking actions outside their intended scope or completing a task in unintended ways.

After routine automated requests were blocked, the agents tried other methods, including public web tools that could open pages and run code, routing requests through other websites and using Amap keys and security codes found in publicly available software code.

Swarmchasers said it found no evidence that the agents breached Amap's main anti-bot safeguards. Most of the 2,818 attempts it recorded either failed or returned anti-bot pages, login screens or blank results.

Some requests returned information through cached pages and intermediary services, including data on visitor arrivals at Chengdu Zoo, Swarmchasers said. The researchers said they could not determine whether an agent read the result or completed its task.

Technology

Anthropic Co-founder Renews Call for Robust Regulation of Frontier AI

AI Research Company Anthropic's Co-Founder and Head of Public Benefit Jack Clark speaks during the Artificial Intelligence and the Global Economy From Risk to Opportunity event of the 2026 Annual Meetings of the IMF and the World Bank Group in Bangkok, Thailand, 16 October 2026. EPA/RUNGROJ YONGRIT
AI Research Company Anthropic's Co-Founder and Head of Public Benefit Jack Clark speaks during the Artificial Intelligence and the Global Economy From Risk to Opportunity event of the 2026 Annual Meetings of the IMF and the World Bank Group in Bangkok, Thailand, 16 October 2026. EPA/RUNGROJ YONGRIT
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Anthropic Co-founder Renews Call for Robust Regulation of Frontier AI

AI Research Company Anthropic's Co-Founder and Head of Public Benefit Jack Clark speaks during the Artificial Intelligence and the Global Economy From Risk to Opportunity event of the 2026 Annual Meetings of the IMF and the World Bank Group in Bangkok, Thailand, 16 October 2026. EPA/RUNGROJ YONGRIT
AI Research Company Anthropic's Co-Founder and Head of Public Benefit Jack Clark speaks during the Artificial Intelligence and the Global Economy From Risk to Opportunity event of the 2026 Annual Meetings of the IMF and the World Bank Group in Bangkok, Thailand, 16 October 2026. EPA/RUNGROJ YONGRIT

Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark renewed calls on Friday for regulating artificial intelligence, saying that allowing companies to continue to operate without robust legislation was like letting a race car loose on the streets at night without brakes.

"It's remarkable to me that the toys I buy for my children are regulated more than the literal super intelligence I work on at my day job," he told an event at the IMF-World Bank's Annual Meetings in Bangkok.

Clark said that US President Donald Trump, whose administration has called for the industry to police itself, was against the idea of regulation but that China was not, said AFP.

"I think it's Formula One at night without maybe brakes in the cars," he said.

He said the lack of clarity around the will for regulation meant "the Formula One car is roaring round and nobody seems to want to put up a guardrail?"

At an industry summit in Dublin on Wednesday, calls to prioritize safety in the development of powerful AI technology dominated the conversation.

Concerns about AI guardrails have soared after models developed by OpenAI and Anthropic were involved in security incidents during testing, piling on pressure to regulate the technology.

A recent Anthropic report suggested small AI models may be only months away from behaving like computer worms, copying themselves from one internet-connected device to the next.

Anthropic has been among those companies calling for governments to step in, even suggesting international coordination to slow down the whole industry -- including Chinese rivals.

That initiative has so far failed to materialize, with companies involved in a hyper-competitive race to attract as much investment as possible.

Technology

Meta Releases Open-Weight Muse Spark Model for Coding, Agentic Tasks

The logo of Meta is seen at the entrance of the company's temporary stand ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland January 18, 2025. (Reuters)
The logo of Meta is seen at the entrance of the company's temporary stand ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland January 18, 2025. (Reuters)
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Meta Releases Open-Weight Muse Spark Model for Coding, Agentic Tasks

The logo of Meta is seen at the entrance of the company's temporary stand ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland January 18, 2025. (Reuters)
The logo of Meta is seen at the entrance of the company's temporary stand ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland January 18, 2025. (Reuters)

Meta ‌Platforms on Thursday released an open-weight version of its Muse Spark artificial intelligence model for coding and AI agents, expanding developers' ability to download and adapt the technology.

Open-weight models make trained parameters available for developers to modify, unlike proprietary models ‌that remain under ‌their creators' control. ‌They ⁠can offer businesses ⁠a lower-cost alternative to closed systems.

Meta said Muse Spark has 816 billion total parameters, with 42 billion active at a time, and ⁠can handle a context window ‌of up ‌to 1 million tokens.

The ‌model can run locally on ‌two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studio computers and is also available through some API providers.

CEO ‌Mark Zuckerberg has argued that advanced AI should ⁠not be ⁠concentrated among a small number of companies.

While open-weight models can give companies greater control over their data, they can require significant computing resources and technical expertise to operate at scale.

In August, Meta released Muse Glimmer, a smaller open-weight model.