Back in December of last year, OpenAI said that you could use ChatGPT via WhatsApp. Now, the company has announced that, come January of next year, you won’t be able to anymore. The specific date provided was 15 January 2026, and the company pins the blame on the chat app.
In a blog post, OpenAI says that it is “unfortunately, due to a policy and terms change from WhatsApp”. Equally unfortunate was the company stopping short of explaining the changes in question. Sort of in lieu of that, the company provided a way for you to keep your ChatGPT conversations from the messaging app.
This involves signing into your ChatGPT account on the Android, iOS, or desktop app. From there, you’ll have to link said account with WhatsApp. This can be done via the chatbot’s profile, linked here for anyone who needs it. For those who are concerned about privacy, this does mean that your phone number will be linked to your ChatGPT account.
In more ways than one though, this is unsurprising, and probably for the better. When it was new, functionality was very limited, so much so that it could not provide you with, up-to-date info. Its implementation this way gave it a knowledge cutoff point of January 2022. And while an update a few months later let it use images and voice clips as prompts, it was not a big enough benefit to supersede the knowledge cutoff.
Either way, the post claims that “ChatGPT will remain available on WhatsApp until that date, and we’ll send reminders along the way”. But when we nudged the chatbot via the messaging app, it gave no response. So make of that what you will.
(Source: OpenAI)
