Meta AI is rolling out in Europe after all

Meta is bringing its AI chatbot to Europe almost one year after pausing its launch in the region. Starting this week, Meta AI will roll out across WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger in 41 European countries and 21 overseas territories — but it will be limited to text-based chat features for now.

Meta AI launched in the US in 2023. While the company intended to bring the assistant to Europe, Meta had to pause the rollout in the region after Ireland’s privacy watchdog asked it to delay training on content posted by Facebook and Instagram users. It also halted the launch of its multimodal Llama AI model in the European Union due to regulatory concerns.

For now, Meta says its AI assistant will only function as a chatbot for users in Europe, helping to brainstorm ideas, plan a trip, or answer specific questions using information from the web. European users will also be able to use Meta AI to surface certain kinds of content on their Instagram feed. However, they can’t use the tool to do things like generate or edit images, as well as ask questions about a photo. The model isn’t trained on EU user data, either.

“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,” Meta spokesperson Ellie Heatrick tells The Verge. “We will continue to work collaboratively 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.”

Last November, Meta started bringing some of its AI features to its Ray-Bans smart glasses in the EU, but the glasses currently don’t support multimodal features that let users ask Meta AI about what they can see. It doesn’t seem like Meta is giving up on plans to bring more features to the European version of Meta AI, as the company says it will work to “find parity with the US and expand our offering over time.”