The European Commission said Friday it is formally assessing whether OpenAI's ChatGPT should be designated a Very Large Online Search Engine under the Digital Services Act, after OpenAI's reported user numbers for the EU landed at 120.4 million average monthly active users across the six months ending September 2025. The 45-million-user threshold for VLOSE designation is roughly 2.7 times over. Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier confirmed "the Commission services are currently assessing this information."
VLOSE is the DSA category for search engines at scale; it is the sibling of VLOP (Very Large Online Platform), which Google, Meta, X, TikTok, and others sit in. Neither category is about what the service does internally; the distinction is effectively whether it returns indexed content like a search engine (VLOSE) or hosts user-generated content like a platform (VLOP). Classifying ChatGPT as VLOSE would be a substantive regulatory position — that a generative-AI chatbot returning synthesized information from training data and live retrieval is functionally a search engine for DSA purposes.
The concrete obligations matter. VLOSE designation triggers a four-month compliance window with specific requirements: annual systemic risk assessments (covering illegal content, fundamental rights, public discourse, mental health of minors), independent audits, algorithmic transparency, researcher data access, crisis response protocols, and content-moderation transparency reports. Fines can reach 6% of global annual revenue. For OpenAI, a company that has been deliberately restrained about training-data disclosures, the researcher-data-access and algorithmic-transparency obligations are the bite. Whether Claude, Gemini, and comparable chatbots face similar designation is the open question; the 45-million threshold likely catches most of them individually, and the Commission's framing for ChatGPT will set the precedent.
If you ship an AI product into the EU that touches information retrieval or generation, two things are worth watching. One, the VLOSE designation for ChatGPT is likely to drive the same classification question for every major assistant crossing 45M EU MAUs, which is most of them. Build your user-count telemetry and EU-specific disclosure capabilities as if that designation is arriving. Two, the "is this a search engine" question the Commission is deciding has implications beyond the DSA; it feeds into copyright analysis under existing EU law and signals how regulators globally are going to categorize generative-AI products for various compliance regimes. The framing chosen here will travel.