Brussels puts ChatGPT in Google's regulatory tier, with fines up to 6% of revenue

The European Commission has pulled ChatGPT into the same regulatory tier as Google Search and Microsoft Bing, designating it a Very Large Online Search Engine (VLOSE) under the Digital Services Act on 31 August 2026. It is the first time a standalone AI chatbot has been classified this way, and it puts OpenAI on the hook for a compliance regime that carries fines of up to 6% of global annual revenue.

Reddit and Roblox were designated Very Large Online Platforms in the same batch, taking the Commission's total list of designated very large platforms and search engines to 28. The trigger for ChatGPT was scale: OpenAI reported about 159.1 million average monthly active recipients of ChatGPT search in the EU for the six months to 31 March 2026, more than three times the DSA's 45 million-user threshold. The Commission's rationale was explicit: the Commission said "ChatGPT is a hybrid service that qualifies as an online search engine under the DSA".

OpenAI now has four months, until the end of December 2026, to fall in line. The obligations are broad: systemic-risk assessments covering illegal content, elections, fundamental rights and minors; data access for outside researchers; disclosure of how ranking and recommendation work, plus a non-personalised option for users; a ban on ad targeting of minors or on sensitive personal traits; and annual independent risk audits.

The timing compounds pressure already building from Brussels. The EU AI Act's transparency rules also became enforceable in August, and reporting from Search Engine Journal notes EU rules are part of why OpenAI and Meta are holding back some AI agent products from the European market.

This is the clearest signal yet that Brussels intends to regulate generative AI search the same way it regulates incumbent search engines, not as a lighter-touch category. For OpenAI, the compliance bill is operational as much as financial: independent audits, researcher data access and a non-personalised mode all require engineering and legal resources that smaller rivals without EU scale won't have to build.

That asymmetry could reshape competition. Chatbots below the 45-million-user threshold escape VLOSE obligations entirely, giving them a cost advantage in the EU market. Watch whether OpenAI treats the December deadline as a compliance floor or uses it to differentiate ChatGPT's EU product, and whether other assistants nearing the threshold slow their EU growth to dodge the same designation.