EU moves to regulate ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine amidst soaring user numbers

The European Commission is poised to classify OpenAI’s ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine, subjecting it to the EU’s toughest digital rules as its EU user base surpasses 120 million, prompting urgent compliance measures.

The European Commission is expected to bring ChatGPT under tougher EU digital rules by classifying it as a Very Large Online Search Engine, according to Handelsblatt, which said unnamed officials at the Commission believe the decision could come within days. If confirmed, the move would place OpenAI’s chatbot in the same regulatory category as major services such as Google Search, reflecting the scale of its reach in Europe and the bloc’s widening effort to police powerful online intermediaries.

The DSA’s threshold for a VLOSE or VLOP is 45 million average monthly users in the EU, and the Commission first set out those designations in April 2023 when it named 17 very large platforms and two very large search engines. OpenAI has said ChatGPT Search reached 120.4 million monthly EU users in the six months to the end of September 2025, comfortably above the legal line. A Commission spokesman, Thomas Regnier, told Reuters that the treatment of large language models would be decided case by case, adding that officials were assessing OpenAI’s published figures rather than applying an automatic rule.

If ChatGPT is designated, OpenAI would have four months to meet the DSA’s additional obligations, including clearer user contact points, better transparency around advertising and moderation, reporting of illegal content and systemic risks, and the introduction of compliance systems and annual independent audits. The company would also need to share monitoring data with regulators and allow vetted researchers access to information relevant to EU-wide risks. The burden is not only administrative: designated firms help fund EU supervision, paying up to 0.05% of annual worldwide net income, while the Commission collected €54.8 million in supervisory fees last year.

The potential penalty for failing to comply is also significant. In December, the Commission fined X €120 million for breaching transparency requirements, underscoring how aggressively Brussels is enforcing the rules on its biggest digital services. For OpenAI, the classification would mark another sign that ChatGPT’s rapid expansion, now measured in hundreds of millions of weekly users globally, is pulling the service deeper into the EU’s most demanding regulatory framework.

Source Reference Map

Inspired by headline at: ^[1]

Sources by paragraph:

Source: Fuse Wire Services