Meta AI finally arrived in Europe on Thursday, eight months after the Facebook owner announced it would delay the launch of the artificial intelligence tool due to regulatory issues.
In addition to 41 European countries, Meta AI will also roll out in 21 overseas territories, marking the service’s most significant international expansion to date. Meta AI is already available through several platforms in the UK, including Instagram, but it will now also be available within the popular messaging service WhatsApp.
The multimodal, multilingual AI assistant sits inside Meta’s apps, allowing you to call on it for various tasks, such as curating content relevant to a trip you’re taking or brainstorming plans within a group chat. As part of Meta AI’s EU expansion, the assistant’s chat function will also be available in six new European languages.
Given that Meta AI launched in the US in September 2023, Europeans have endured a significant wait to be able to enjoy the same AI experiences on Facebook and Messenger as their friends across the Atlantic. But Meta is far from the only company that has had trouble grappling with how European regulations affect the rollout of AI tools. Apple Intelligence is still unavailable in EU countries, although the company has said a Europe-wide release is scheduled for April. Both companies have struggled with the regulatory environment in Europe, which prioritizes people’s data privacy (making it harder to train models) and leveling the playing field between tech giants and smaller companies.
Both Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg have been vocal about how slow EU regulators have been in allowing the company to move ahead with a European Meta AI. Zuckerberg said last December that it was “sad” that Europeans were being left behind. Nevertheless, the company has persevered and has now reached a point where it’s confident it can launch Meta AI in the region while complying with the rules.
“We have been working to find a way to bring Meta AI to the EU in a way that complies with Europe’s fragmented and unpredictable regulatory system,” a Meta spokesperson said. “This launch follows almost a year of intensive engagement with various European regulators and for now, we are only offering a text-only model in the region which wasn’t trained on first-party data from users in the EU.”
The spokesperson added that the company will continue to collaborate with regulators so that people in Europe “have access to and are properly served by Meta’s AI innovations that are already available to the rest of the world.”
