EU eyes OpenAI under DSA

European Union regulators are examining whether OpenAI’s ChatGPT should fall under the Digital Services Act’s toughest tier for very large online services. (yahoo.com) The trigger is scale: the Digital Services Act uses a threshold of 45 million average monthly active recipients in the European Union, roughly 10 percent of the bloc’s population. The European Commission said on April 11 that it was analyzing whether ChatGPT meets that test. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu, eur-lex.europa.eu, yahoo.com) OpenAI has already published one key number: for the six months ending September 30, 2025, “ChatGPT search” had about 120.4 million average monthly active recipients in the European Union. OpenAI said that figure was calculated for Digital Services Act compliance and should not be used for other purposes. (help.openai.com) The Digital Services Act is the European Union’s platform rulebook, not its artificial intelligence law. It governs how online intermediaries handle illegal content, user complaints, transparency, and systemic risk once they become large enough. (eur-lex.europa.eu, eur-lex.europa.eu) If the Commission formally designates ChatGPT as a very large online search engine or platform, OpenAI would face added duties such as annual risk assessments, independent audits, researcher access rules, and closer Commission supervision. Providers also get four months to comply after designation. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu, edaa.eu) That would put OpenAI into a system built for services with broad public reach, alongside the companies the Commission first designated in April 2023 under the same law. The Commission said then that the strictest Digital Services Act obligations applied to platforms and search engines reaching at least 45 million monthly users in the bloc. (ec.europa.eu) The classification question is also unusually specific: regulators are weighing whether ChatGPT should be treated as a search engine under the law, not only as a chatbot. OpenAI’s own disclosure counted users of “ChatGPT search,” the part of the product that retrieves live information from the web. (help.openai.com, europarl.europa.eu) The Commission reviewed the 45 million-user line in a report published in late 2025 and said the threshold remained “fit-for-purpose.” That means Brussels did not lower the bar for newer services before taking a closer look at ChatGPT. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu, eur-lex.europa.eu) OpenAI has already built some Digital Services Act machinery, including an European Union help page, a government contact portal, and transparency reporting. The next step is whether the Commission decides those baseline disclosures now require the bloc’s highest level of platform oversight. (help.openai.com, openai.com)