EU Reportedly Set to Designate ChatGPT and Roblox as 'Very Large Online Platforms'

What happened

The European Union's executive arm is preparing to designate ChatGPT and Roblox as "very large online platforms" (VLOPs) under the Digital Services Act, according to a Bloomberg report cited by both Gizmodo and Engadget. The designation would place the two services in the DSA's highest regulatory tier, alongside existing VLOPs such as TikTok, YouTube, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, and Wikipedia.

The VLOP threshold is 45 million EU-based monthly users. Once a platform crosses that line, it becomes subject to the DSA's strictest obligations, including risk assessments, transparency reporting, researcher data access, and potential enforcement actions.

The report originates from an anonymously sourced Bloomberg article, so official EU confirmation is still pending. Neither OpenAI nor Roblox has publicly commented on the expected designation as of the reporting date.

Why it matters

Applying VLOP status to an AI chatbot signals that the EU may treat conversational AI services as systemic platforms, not just tools. That is a meaningful expansion of the DSA's regulatory perimeter, which was originally designed around social media and user-generated-content services.

For Roblox, the move fits more naturally into the DSA's original framing: it is a gaming sandbox and online space where users — many of them children — interact, and where content moderation and safety concerns have long been prominent.

For ChatGPT, the implications are broader. If an AI assistant with tens of millions of EU users is treated as a VLOP, developers of other large-scale AI products may eventually face similar obligations, including transparency reports and researcher access to data. That changes the compliance architecture for any AI company scaling in Europe.

The EU's Digital Services Act has become, in practice, a de facto global regulatory framework for large tech platforms. Designations under the DSA often shape product decisions well beyond Europe, because companies tend to build compliance into their global operations rather than maintain separate EU-only systems.

What to watch

• Official confirmation: The Bloomberg report is anonymously sourced. Watch for an official EU announcement and any public statements from OpenAI or Roblox.
• Scope of obligations: The specific transparency, risk-assessment, and data-access requirements applied to an AI chatbot may differ from those applied to a gaming platform. The EU's implementing details will matter.
• Precedent for AI services: If ChatGPT is designated a VLOP, other large AI assistants and conversational products operating in the EU could face similar scrutiny as their user bases grow.
• Compliance timelines: VLOP designations typically come with deadlines for producing risk assessments and transparency reports. Those timelines will indicate how quickly affected companies must operationalize new reporting and moderation processes.
• Enforcement signals: The EU has already begun enforcement actions against existing VLOPs. How it approaches an AI chatbot under the DSA will set an early precedent for AI-specific content and transparency regulation.