Millions of ChatGPT users across Europe will start seeing adverts from Monday, as it remains unclear how regulators will approach ads in AI chatbots.
Starting Monday, tens of millions of ChatGPT users across Europe will see adverts inside their conversations with the chatbot for the first time, as OpenAI rolls out its recently launched advertising programme to its largest market yet.
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The company is extending ChatGPT Ads to 31 European countries from 24 August, and the rollout brings the total up to 40 markets.
OpenAI began testing ads in the US in February, then extended the programme through the year to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea.
Ads will only show up on ChatGPT's Free and Go plans, the cheapest tiers, while Plus, Pro and Enterprise subscribers will not see any. The move gives European marketers "a new way to reach people while they are actively exploring, comparing, and making decisions," the company said in a statement.
Ads in chatbots?
OpenAI says protecting user trust is foundational to how it approaches advertising. It says it keeps "conversations private from advertisers and never sell[s] customer data."
"Ads in ChatGPT are always clearly labelled and separate from ChatGPT’s answers, and advertising does not influence the answers ChatGPT provides," the statement continued.
The reassurances follow criticism that has dogged the ad programme since it was first announced.
In January 2026, US Senator Ed Markey wrote to Sam Altman and six other tech CEOs warning that advertising in AI chatbots risked exploiting the emotional connection users form with them, and asked how OpenAI would stop ads targeting sensitive conversations about health, mental health or politics.
When ads first appeared in the US in February, some users also objected to seeing them on the paid Go tier, which costs $8 a month, arguing that paying for a service should mean going without adverts, not just fewer of them.
Users will be able to control ad personalisation, and anyone who would rather not see ads at all can pay for the pricier ad-free plans.
Where the AI Act comes in
The rollout raises a question the EU's AI Act was partly built to answer: when does personalised persuasion tip into manipulation?
The Act bans AI systems that use subliminal or deliberately manipulative techniques, or exploit people's vulnerabilities, in ways that cause significant harm.
Researchers and consumer groups say conversational AI is a particularly hard case for that rule.
An advert dropped into a personalised, trusted chat exchange is harder to spot as persuasion than a banner ad or a sponsored search result, precisely because it arrives in the same conversational tone as the advice on either side of it.
Chatbot ads have not yet been fully tested by regulators or courts.
A separate fight over platform status
A different regulatory question sits alongside that one, this time under the Digital Services Act (DSA) rather than the AI Act.
The European Commission is weighing whether ChatGPT's search function should be designated a very large online search engine, a status triggered once a service passes 45 million monthly users in the EU.
Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told Reuters in July that such a designation was "definitely possible" and could come "sooner or later".
That label would bring much heavier obligations: annual risk assessments, independent audits, a public advertising repository and closer data-sharing with regulators.
