EU may reclassify ChatGPT under DSA
Reports say EU officials are considering treating ChatGPT as a 'very large search engine' under the Digital Services Act, which would attach heavier transparency and safety obligations to conversational AI services. If formalised, that kind of reclassification would show Europe is willing to apply existing platform rules to AI products that resemble discovery or search infrastructure (economictimes.indiatimes.com).
European Union officials are reviewing whether ChatGPT should be treated like a search engine under the Digital Services Act after OpenAI reported user numbers above the law’s trigger line. The review follows a Reuters report on April 10, 2026, and a Commission statement that it is examining the available data. (reuters.com) That trigger line is 45 million monthly users in the European Union. Under the Digital Services Act, any service above that mark can be designated a “very large online search engine” and gets four months to comply after the formal designation. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu) OpenAI’s own European Union disclosure says ChatGPT search had about 120.4 million average monthly active recipients in the six-month period ending September 30, 2025. That is not the whole ChatGPT product in general; it is the web-search feature inside ChatGPT that pulls live information into answers. (help.openai.com, economictimes.indiatimes.com) The fight is over category, not just size. A chatbot usually looks like a one-on-one assistant, but a search engine is treated more like public infrastructure because millions of people use it to find information, links, and sources. (reuters.com, digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu) If Brussels puts ChatGPT in that bucket, the service would face the heaviest layer of the Digital Services Act. Those rules include annual risk assessments, outside audits, internal compliance systems, and mitigation plans for harms tied to illegal content, disinformation, minors, public health, and fundamental rights. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu, digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu) That is a different model from the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act, which mostly regulates artificial intelligence by use case and risk tier. The Digital Services Act instead asks what role a service plays in the information system and how many people it reaches each month. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu, artificialintelligenceact.eu) Europe has already used these search-engine rules on classic internet gatekeepers. The Commission designated Google Search and Microsoft Bing as very large online search engines in April 2023, which created a ready-made legal template for services that shape what people discover online. (digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu) ChatGPT is awkward for regulators because it does not return a page of ten blue links. It writes a single blended answer, which means the ranking, the summary, and the confidence cues are fused together in one response instead of being spread across a list of websites. (help.openai.com, reuters.com) That difference is exactly why this case matters. If the European Union says a conversational tool can still count as search, then other artificial intelligence products that help people find news, shops, doctors, flights, or answers may find themselves judged by what they function like, not what they call themselves. (reuters.com, digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu) OpenAI has not publicly confirmed a final designation, and the Commission has only said it is reviewing the data. But once a chatbot crosses 120 million European Union users on its search feature, the argument that it is too small or too novel for old platform rules gets much harder to make. (economictimes.indiatimes.com, help.openai.com)
