EU may treat OpenAI as a DSA platform

European regulators are examining whether ChatGPT should be treated like a very large online platform under the Digital Services Act, a law that was built for giant consumer services such as marketplaces and social networks. Reuters reported on April 10 that the review started after reported European user numbers crossed the legal threshold. (reuters.com) That threshold is 45 million average monthly users in the European Union. The European Commission says any service above that line falls into the category with the toughest Digital Services Act duties. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu) The surprise is not that ChatGPT is big. OpenAI said in October 2025 that ChatGPT had 700 million weekly active users, and in March 2026 it said the figure had risen above 900 million weekly active users worldwide. (openai.com 1) (openai.com 2) The surprise is that Europe may now regulate ChatGPT through two different doors at once. The Artificial Intelligence Act covers the model itself, while the Digital Services Act covers the service as a public-facing platform used by tens of millions of people. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu 1) (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu 2) Under the Artificial Intelligence Act, providers of general-purpose artificial intelligence models must keep technical documentation, share information with downstream developers, maintain a copyright policy, and publish a training-data summary. Those obligations started applying on August 2, 2025, for general-purpose models. (artificialintelligenceact.eu) (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu) Under the Digital Services Act, the very large category brings a different kind of homework. The European Commission says those services must deal with systemic risks, undergo independent audits, and publish annual risk assessment reports. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu 1) (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu 2) That matters because a chatbot is not just a model in a lab. It is also a distribution system that can rank answers, surface links, refuse requests, generate images, and reach millions of people in one interface, which makes it look more like a platform regulator’s problem than a pure software component. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu) (eur-lex.europa.eu) The Digital Services Act already gives Brussels tools to ask large services detailed questions about how their systems work. In October 2024, for example, the Commission sent formal requests to YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok about the design of their recommender systems. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu) If ChatGPT is designated, OpenAI would be pulled deeper into that same inspection style, but for a product that changes weekly and answers prompts one by one. That is a harder fit than checking a static catalog page or a social feed, because the output depends on the user’s exact words and the model version running at that moment. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu) (openai.com) For companies building on OpenAI, this is a reminder that one provider can end up under multiple rulebooks in multiple regions at the same time. A bank, retailer, or software company that plugs one model into customer support in Europe may need controls that change by country, by product surface, and by vendor contract. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu) (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu) That is why the practical response inside enterprises is getting less philosophical and more mechanical. Teams want logs that show which model answered which user in which country under which policy, and they want the option to swap providers without rebuilding the whole product when the legal perimeter moves again. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu) (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu)