EU considers treating ChatGPT as a platform

European Union regulators are examining whether ChatGPT should be treated as a very large platform under the Digital Services Act. (ec.europa.eu) The trigger is scale: the Digital Services Act uses a 45 million average monthly user threshold in the European Union for its biggest category of services. OpenAI says ChatGPT search averaged about 120.4 million monthly active recipients in the bloc in the six months ending September 30, 2025. (eur-lex.europa.eu) (openai.com) The European Commission is reviewing that disclosure and has not yet said publicly whether ChatGPT would be classified as a very large online platform or a very large online search engine. Reuters, published by Economic Times on April 11, 2026, said the assessment is being handled case by case. (enterpriseai.economictimes.indiatimes.com) Under the law, the biggest services face extra duties beyond the baseline rules that apply to digital intermediaries. The European Commission says designated services must assess and reduce systemic risks, submit to independent audits, share data with regulators and researchers in some cases, and publish stronger transparency reporting. (ec.europa.eu 1) (ec.europa.eu 2) That question has been hanging over ChatGPT for months as regulators tried to fit a chatbot into a law written mainly with social networks, marketplaces, and search engines in mind. Politico reported in November 2025 that Commission officials expected a decision only in mid-2026. (politico.eu) The Digital Services Act took effect in November 2022, and the first very large platforms and search engines were designated in April 2023. The European Commission later said those designations covered services that reached at least 45 million monthly users in the bloc. (ec.europa.eu 1) (ec.europa.eu 2) OpenAI is already publishing Digital Services Act material for Europe, including a help page on its point of contact for authorities and a transparency report covering February 17, 2024 through February 28, 2025. Those disclosures exist because some Digital Services Act obligations apply before any very large service designation. (openai.com 1) (openai.com 2) A designation would not replace the European Union’s separate Artificial Intelligence Act, which governs artificial intelligence systems by risk category. It would add a second layer of platform-style oversight to a product that regulators are still deciding how to classify. (ec.europa.eu) (eur-lex.europa.eu) What happens next is narrower than the politics around artificial intelligence suggest: Brussels has to decide what ChatGPT is under the Digital Services Act, and then whether its user scale is enough to pull it into the law’s toughest tier. (enterpriseai.economictimes.indiatimes.com) (politico.eu)