The European Commission designated OpenAI's ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine and Reddit and Roblox as Very Large Online Platforms under the Digital Services Act on August 31, placing all three under the EU's strictest tier of online-service regulation. The designation applies once a service reports at least 45 million average monthly users in the EU; the Commission said ChatGPT qualifies as a search engine specifically because it responds to prompts with information the way a search engine does, a dual role the Commission described as a hybrid service, while Reddit and Roblox qualify as platforms because users publish and distribute content through them.
The three services now have four months, until the end of November 2026, to complete risk assessments and mitigation plans covering areas including illegal content, protection of minors, election integrity, and public security, and are subject to fines of up to 6 percent of global annual revenue for non-compliance. EU tech sovereignty commissioner Henna Virkkunen said the designations mean the three services will face a higher standard of scrutiny given their scale of impact, and that the Commission would not hesitate to designate further platforms that meet the threshold. With this addition, 28 platforms and search engines now sit in the DSA's highest-scrutiny tier.
The move extends a pattern of EU regulatory attention toward generative AI specifically: X's Grok chatbot is already under a separate DSA investigation. Reddit's shares fell more than 3 percent on the day of the announcement.
