Meta’s personal AI agents test Europe’s privacy safeguards

Meta’s push to build artificial intelligence agents that understand users, remember personal context and complete everyday tasks is set to face an extensive European regulatory test as key provisions of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act become applicable.

The company is developing increasingly autonomous versions of Meta AI capable of planning activities, shopping, finding information and acting across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Threads. Meta describes the project as a step towards “personal superintelligence”, with assistants designed to understand an individual’s interests, relationships and digital habits.

That ambition creates legal questions extending well beyond the AI Act. An assistant that analyses messages, posts, contacts, searches, purchases and location signals could fall within European rules governing profiling, sensitive information, consent, automated decisions and the combination of data across services.

Most provisions of the AI Act become applicable on August 2, 2026, although requirements for prohibited practices, artificial intelligence literacy and general-purpose models entered into force earlier. The framework places duties on providers and deployers based on the risk posed by a system’s intended use.

A general consumer assistant would not automatically qualify as a high-risk system. Its classification could change, however, when it performs functions linked to recruitment, credit assessment, insurance, education, essential services or other areas listed by the legislation. Meta may therefore need to evaluate individual agent capabilities rather than treating the assistant as one uniform product.

Transparency rules will require people to be informed when they are interacting with artificial intelligence. Providers must also ensure that synthetic audio, images, video and text can be identified in machine-readable form where the relevant requirements apply.

The General Data Protection Regulation is likely to create the more immediate challenge. Profiling covers automated processing used to evaluate or predict matters such as preferences, behaviour, reliability, economic circumstances, health, location and movements. A deeply personalised agent could perform several of those activities continuously.

Meta would need a valid legal basis for each category of processing. Consent must be freely given, specific, informed and capable of being withdrawn. Relying on one broad permission covering multiple services and purposes could invite scrutiny, particularly where users cannot access an equivalent service without agreeing to extensive data use.

The risks increase when conversations reveal health conditions, political opinions, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, biometric information or other special categories of data. Processing such information is generally prohibited unless a defined exemption applies. Explicit consent may be required in circumstances where the system uses sensitive details to personalise answers or take actions.

European rules also give people the right not to be subject to decisions based solely on automated processing when those decisions produce legal or similarly significant effects. An agent recommending a product would usually present less risk than one submitting a loan application, screening a job candidate or changing an insurance arrangement without meaningful human involvement.

Cross-service access presents another obstacle. The Digital Markets Act requires designated gatekeepers to obtain consent before combining or cross-using personal data between core platform services and other offerings. Meta’s ability to let an agent draw simultaneously from Facebook activity, Instagram interests, WhatsApp interactions and advertising data may therefore depend on clearly separated choices.

The European Commission has already challenged Meta’s approach to consent and data combination in its advertising business. Meta was fined €200 million in April 2025 after regulators found that its earlier model did not provide users with an adequate alternative to accepting extensive personal-data use. The company later committed to offering European users an option involving less data sharing and more limited advertising personalisation.

Personal agents could reopen the same debate in a more complex form. Users may value an assistant precisely because it can connect information held across different applications. Regulators will examine whether permission is genuinely optional, whether refusing access reduces the service unfairly and whether data collected for social networking or messaging can be repurposed for agent training and operation.

Security will form another part of the assessment. Autonomous agents can invoke tools, follow external instructions and carry out multi-step actions. Prompt-injection attacks, inaccurate outputs or excessive permissions could expose private information or cause an agent to perform an unintended transaction.

Researchers have called for agents to operate with tightly defined permissions, comprehensive activity logs and controls that intercept sensitive actions before execution. Data minimisation will also require systems to access only the information needed for a specified task rather than drawing automatically from a user’s entire account history.