One AI, Two Rulebooks: Brussels’ ChatGPT Conundrum
ChatGPT can draft a memo, plan a trip, and search the web. As of Aug. 31, it can add another line to its regulatory résumé: The European Commission has designated it a “very large online search engine” under the Digital Services Act (DSA).
The label may sound technical, but it captures a central problem for digital regulation: What happens when a service does too many things to fit neatly into any one legal category?
That question sits at the heart of today’s competition-policy debate over whether the wave of digital-market regulations adopted in recent years remains fit for purpose. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly AI-enabled applications, is already testing how well these frameworks can adapt to technologies their drafters did not anticipate.
The existing regimes face two related challenges. First, regulators must determine how to classify AI applications that become new gateways to digital services. Second, they must decide how to respond as new AI providers reshape competition and perhaps acquire gatekeeping power of their own. AI assistants and agents—tools that can perform multistep tasks on a user’s behalf—could upend familiar patterns of web browsing, online search, and e-commerce.
Of course, the competitive effects could cut in either direction. Incumbent platforms could integrate AI features in ways that shut out emerging providers. Alternative, new entrants could use those same technologies to challenge or even displace heretofore entrenched firms. Today’s disruptors, in other words, could become tomorrow’s gatekeepers.
Both possibilities expose the same basic problem: AI services do not fit neatly into the regulatory boxes that governments have built for digital markets. They increasingly behave like platforms, connecting users with other services and performing functions associated with search engines, online marketplaces, and virtual assistants. Yet frameworks organized around those predefined categories struggle to capture services that combine all three.