On 31 August the European Commission put ChatGPT in a bucket built for Google and Bing. The label is Very Large Online Search Engine, the DSA's term for search products that pass 45 million monthly users in the EU. OpenAI Ireland was counted at about 159 million. Miss the new duties and the fine can hit 6 percent of global annual revenue.
The catch is the word search. Politico's reporting says the extra transparency and risk rules attach to the parts of ChatGPT that retrieve and rank information. A conversation where the model just talks, the kind people use like a friend or a late-night therapist, looks like it sits outside that box. Christel Schaldemose, who helped negotiate the DSA, said the tool is more than a search engine and that the chatbot's own risks sit outside the strongest duties.
That is a weird split if you actually use the product. Asking for a list of candidates in a local race is search. Asking the same bot who you should vote for is chat. One of those conversations is now under the DSA's search regime. The other may not be. João Pedro Quintais at the University of Amsterdam calls the whole thing a hybrid: search plus platform plus publisher of its own sentences.
The Commission could have called it a Very Large Online Platform instead. That would have piled on more moderation chores, and it would have dragged in safe-harbor logic written for other people's posts. A chatbot's answers are not other people's posts. Calling it search avoids that fiction, and it also leaves a hole around the uses that worry people most: kids, companion chat, election talk that is not a lookup.
The AI Act is the other hammer. It already sits on the models. This DSA tag sits on the consumer front door. Two rulebooks, one product, and the part that feels like a person is still the part the 2022 law never imagined.
Sources: Politico and The Next Web on the designation.
