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Reviewed and published by trentmaziarz, March 17, 2026. Discovered and drafted by our automated research pipeline.
Meta AI is a free AI chatbot built into Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger that can answer questions, generate images, help with tasks, and hold voice conversations — available to approximately 700 million users monthly.
Details
Beta launched September 2023 (Llama 2); upgraded April 2024 (Llama 3, full rollout); multimodal September 2024 (Llama 3.2 — photo understanding, voice mode); standalone app April 2025 (Llama 4). ~700M monthly active users as of January 2025. Features: text chat, image generation, voice mode, photo analysis, web search, image editing. Controversies: hallucinated in parents' Facebook groups (claimed to have a child). FTC investigation into child safety. Reuters (August 2025) revealed 200-page internal document showing chatbot guidelines permitted romantic conversations with minors. Meta refused to sign EU's voluntary AI Code of Practice (only major AI company to do so). EU AI Act GPAI obligations apply from August 2025.
Products affected
FacebookInstagramWhatsAppMessengermeta.aiMeta AI mobile appRay-Ban MetaQuest
Sources & Evidence
Company Disclosure
Cite this record
Trace Foundation. (2026). Meta: Meta AI is a free AI chatbot built into Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger that can answer questions, generate images, help with tasks, and hold voice conversations — available to approximately 700 million users monthly (data as of 2026-03-17) [Data set record]. AI Trace. https://www.aitrace.org/r/practice/a9ccb529-a502-4327-8259-840514b308c1. Accessed October 13, 2026.
- Stable link
- https://www.aitrace.org/r/practice/a9ccb529-a502-4327-8259-840514b308c1
- Data as of
- March 17, 2026
- Last verified
- March 5, 2026
Other practices by Meta
RecommendationAll content that appears in Facebook and Instagram feeds — posts, Reels, Stories, suggested accounts, Explore — is ranked by AI systems that predict what each user is most likely to engage with.ModerationMeta is training large language models to read its content policies and make enforcement decisions on flagged posts — replacing human content reviewers in an increasing number of violation categories.ModerationMeta uses AI to automatically scan and remove content that violates its rules across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads — handling billions of posts per day before human reviewers ever see them.
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