EU competition regulators on Monday charged Meta Platforms with breaching antitrust rules by blocking artificial intelligence rivals from its messaging service, WhatsApp, and threatened to impose interim measures against the US tech giant.

The move by the European Commission came after Meta implemented its policy on 15 January allowing only its AI assistant Meta AI on WhatsApp.

The EU executive, which acts as the EU antitrust watchdog, said it had sent a statement of objections or charge sheet to Meta for violating the bloc’s rules.

“The commission therefore intends to impose interim measures to prevent this policy change from causing serious and irreparable harm on the market, subject to Meta’ s reply and rights of defence,” it said in a statement.

Its decision on interim measures will depend on Meta’s reply and rights of defence.

Meta, however, hit back on Monday in a statement. “The facts are that there is no reason for the EU to intervene in the WhatsApp Business API. There are many AI options and people can use them from app stores, operating systems, devices, websites and industry partnerships,” a Meta spokesman said in an e-mail.