The DMA’s AI Dilemma: Too Soon, Too Late, or Both?
The European Commission’s first review of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) lands at an awkward moment. Just as Brussels begins to test whether its flagship digital regulation works, AI threatens to change the game the DMA was built to police. The question is not just whether the DMA can handle AI. It is whether lawmakers built it for the right market at all.
As AI spreads, it has sharpened an old question in a new setting: How should competition policy preserve room for innovation while also addressing the anticompetitive risks new technologies can create? The pace of AI development raises an even more pointed concern. Can recently adopted ex ante rules—rules meant to prevent competitive harm before it occurs—remain “future-proof” in digital markets? The DMA did not anticipate AI’s rapid rise. It may age faster than expected.
That concern looks more urgent with the emergence of assistive and agentic AI. These tools could reshape core digital intermediation functions, including web browsing, online search, and e-commerce. Put less grandly: They may change how users find, choose, and buy things online. AI assistants and agents increasingly act as standalone interfaces, allowing users to access third-party goods, services, and content without leaving a conversational environment. That shift could reconfigure where—and how—competitive power concentrates.
This backdrop highlights a familiar tension. Competition law moves slowly, but it adapts. Its open-ended standards can evolve with changing market realities. Sector-specific regulation works differently. It can target problems quickly and directly, but it often locks in assumptions about how markets operate. When technology shifts, those assumptions can break.
The DMA illustrates the tradeoff. Despite its recent adoption, the regime already risks rapid aging. Lawmakers designed it for a digital ecosystem that AI-driven intermediation may soon transform.
Against that backdrop, the European Commission asked stakeholders whether the DMA can address AI-powered services as they roll out. It also considered whether to revise the list of core platform services—the categories of digital services covered by the DMA—and the obligations attached to them.
New AI entrants sit at the center of that inquiry. When existing gatekeepers integrate AI into their ecosystems, the DMA may capture those services. The regulation does not clearly reach new, standalone AI operators.
The report tempers expectations. So far, the Commission has taken a cautious line. It views the DMA as fit for purpose and does not propose amendments. In the Commission’s view, the regulation has proved adaptable enough to keep pace with developments like AI. Even so, its analysis focuses mainly on how existing gatekeepers deploy AI within designated core platform services.
That leaves a mixed picture. The Commission is, at once, both right and wrong.