Technology and AI
ChatGPT, Reddit and Roblox move into the strictest tier of European supervision
By Staff Writer | 1 September 2026
The European Commission has designated ChatGPT as a very large online search engine and Reddit and Roblox as very large online platforms under the Digital Services Act. All three declared at least 45 million average monthly users in the European Union, and all three have four months to meet the additional duties that follow.
The designations were announced on 31 August. They rest on a single arithmetical trigger: a service that reaches at least 45 million average monthly users in the Union crosses into the top supervisory tier, and each of the three declared that it does. The Commission has now designated 28 platforms and search engines at that level.
The classification of ChatGPT is the part that will be read closely elsewhere. The Commission describes it as an artificial intelligence system that engages with and responds to prompts and queries, including by searching the web, and concludes that it is a hybrid service qualifying as an online search engine. Reddit and Roblox are treated as platforms because each lets users spread third party content to the public, the first through topic based communities and the second through games made by other users.
These new designations mean that ChatGPT, Reddit and Roblox will now be held to a higher standard of scrutiny and accountability in the European Union, in line with their large impact on our citizens and society.
Henna Virkkunen, Executive Vice-President for Tech Sovereignty, Security and Democracy, European Commission
What the four months actually require
The deadline is January 2027. By then each service must assess and mitigate the systemic risks arising from the service itself and from its algorithmic systems. The release lists those risks: the dissemination of illegal content, negative effects on minors, users' physical and mental well-being, fundamental rights, electoral processes and public security. That is a risk assessment obligation rather than a content rule, and it bites on the design of the system, not only on what is posted through it.
The duty attaches to the algorithm as much as to the content. A service that cannot describe how its own ranking behaves cannot demonstrate that it has assessed the risk the ranking creates.
Alongside the duties, the Commission gains investigative powers over the functionality of the designated services and any related system. Supervision is shared. For ChatGPT and Reddit the Commission will work with Coimisiun na Mean, the Irish Digital Services Coordinator, because both are established in Ireland; for Roblox it will work with the Authority for Consumers and Markets in the Netherlands. None of the three is starting from nothing, since all were already subject to the general obligations that apply to platforms and search engines.
The reason this matters beyond the three names
Designation is a threshold mechanism, and thresholds catch whatever grows past them. A conversational assistant was not what the drafters had in mind when they wrote the definition of an online search engine, yet the definition reached it, because the service answers questions by going to the open web. Any business that builds a user facing assistant on top of a search capability and takes it to a European audience now has a scale at which the regulatory character of the product changes.
For an immersive platform such as Roblox the effects on minors limb is the operative one, and it is the limb that is hardest to satisfy with a policy document rather than a design change. For a discussion platform it is illegal content and electoral process. For an assistant it is likely to be all of them at once, since a single interface answers on every subject.
Four months is not long to build an evidenced risk assessment where none existed, and the clock started on the day of notification rather than on the day anyone is ready.