Almost everyone uses AI now. Moms use it to plan dinner. Kids use it to help with homework. Grandparents use it to answer questions they once would have Googled. Businesses rely on it every day. Whether we like it or not, ChatGPT has become a powerful tool for finding, organizing, and explaining information. This reality makes a new announcement from Brussels impossible to ignore.
The European Commission has decreed that ChatGPT, in addition to Reddit and Roblox, fall under its draconian Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s sweeping law regulating expression online.
The Commission’s announcement follows the services’ own reports that they reached 45 million average monthly users in the EU. This is the threshold that triggers a designation of “Very Large Online Platform” or, in ChatGPT’s case, a “Very Large Online Search Engine.” By the DSA’s own rules, crossing that threshold brings the operation of these services in the EU under the Commission’s control.
As a result, ChatGPT will be subject to EU-controlled information regulations that take effect within four months, including requirements to assess and mitigate “systemic risks” associated with its service and algorithmic systems. The Commission has thus positioned itself to determine what users see on ChatGPT, Reddit, and Roblox. Should the platforms fail to comply, Brussels has the power to slap them with fines of up to 6% of their annual global revenue
Per the announcement, “these services have four months, i.e. by January 2027, to comply…assessing and mitigating the systemic risks stemming from their service and algorithmic systems related to the dissemination of illegal content, the negative effects on minors, users’ physical and mental well-being, fundamental rights, electoral processes and public security.”
That list should give anyone who cares about free expression pause. The DSA places online platforms under a censorial regulatory framework in which Brussels, aided by the sprawling censorship ecosystem it funds and coordinates, determines exactly what kind of information must be assessed and mitigated. When that framework is applied to a tool that millions of people use to find and understand information, the implications for free expression are catastrophic. This is precisely why the DSA should be repealed.
Governments have a legitimate role in prohibiting content that should be illegal such as incitement to violence. The problem is what happens when an unchecked bureaucracy claims a virtually limitless mandate to control the online information environment.
As we see with the EU’s new designation, once the bureaucracy acquires the authority to police information in the name of combating “systemic risks,” there is no obvious logical stopping point. The list of risks expands. The platforms covered expand. And the pressure to conform expands with them.
ChatGPT is a perfect illustration. Brussels is not merely regulating a traditional social-media platform. It has now brought an AI tool used by millions of people under the DSA’s anti-free speech regime. The stakes are enormous because AI systems increasingly mediate how people discover and understand information. Controlling the primary tools people use to find answers is a censor’s pipe dream. Shape the information people receive, and you can shape what they think. Brussels has now built the machinery to make that dream a reality.
ChatGPT is a global service, and the systems through which it searches for and presents information do not exist in neatly separated European and American silos. It is entirely reasonable to conclude that OpenAI may choose to implement changes globally rather than maintain entirely separate systems for EU users. This means that European regulations are likely to have very real consequences for users across the globe, including Americans.
It is not acceptable for Brussels to set the rules for the information seen by Europeans and, likely, the rest of the world.
Years ago, people worried about the reliability of Wikipedia because anyone could edit an entry. Those fears pale in comparison. At least Wikipedia’s edits could be examined, debated, and corrected. AI is different. It is opaque. Even its creators acknowledge that they cannot fully explain how these systems generate the answers people receive. People increasingly ask a machine for an answer and receive a synthesized response that shapes what they believe to be true. Now, Brussels wants to control those answers.
Brussels is trying to suppress “hate,” “misinformation,” and “disinformation.” But the answer to speech authorities dislike is not censorship. It is counter-speech: the free flow of information, dialogue, and debate. Truth is often difficult to untangle, and determining what is true in the age of AI is even more difficult. But the answer is not to install bureaucratic ideologues in Brussels as a Ministry of Truth.
Free people must be allowed to encounter competing claims, question them, and reach their own conclusions. Each of us must exercise critical thinking to discern truth for ourselves. We must not surrender that uniquely human responsibility to bureaucrats telling technology companies how to manage the information we receive.
European censorship isn’t coming for Americans. It’s already here. The United States must reject wholesale the manufactured information environment Brussels seeks to impose and use every tool at its disposal, legal and diplomatic, to defend the freedom of Americans to think and speak for themselves, on AI and across the entire internet.
Jeremy Tedesco serves as senior counsel and senior vice president of the Counter Censorship Task Force at Alliance Defending Freedom, where he leads the organization’s efforts to confront and dismantle coordinated systems of corporate and state-sponsored censorship in the United States and abroad. Follow him on X at @Jeremy_Tedesco.
Jeremy Tedesco serves as senior counsel and senior vice president of the Counter Censorship Task Force at Alliance Defending Freedom, where he leads the organization’s efforts to confront and dismantle coordinated systems of corporate and state-sponsored censorship in the United States and abroad. Follow him on X at @Jeremy_Tedesco.
