On 8 October 2026, the Prosecutor General of the Belgian Competition Authority (the BCA), Damien Gerard, stated at a conference that EU competition authorities are monitoring established technology companies that are embedding AI products into their existing systems.
Speaking to trade magazine “Global Competition Review”, Gerard also revealed that the BCA has received complaints from independent developers about Microsoft Copilot. The core concern is that Microsoft now embeds Copilot into its 365 productivity suite, raising issues of tying and bundling. The BCA has not yet opened a formal investigation.
Gerard also said he was opposed to the idea of an antitrust “safe harbour” for AI companies, a protection sought by firms wishing to cooperate on security and safety issues. In his view, such an exemption would allow established AI companies to “boycott” non-proprietary technologies, including rapidly developing open-source alternatives.
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AI is, unsurprisingly, attracting intense scrutiny from competition authorities, which extends beyond the classic scenario of using AI to facilitate collusion. In December 2025, the European Commission (the Commission) opened a formal investigation (see attached, Press Release of 4 December 2025) into Meta’s policy of blocking third-party standalone AI assistants from accessing the WhatsApp Business Solution, while simultaneously bundling and promoting its own proprietary “Meta AI”. That same month, the Commission launched another investigation (see attached, Press Release of 9 December 2025) to assess whether Google infringed EU competition law by using web publishers’ content to provide “AI mode” search results without their consent or compensation, as well as content uploaded to YouTube for AI training purposes. In a staff document on the review of Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 (Digital Markets Act – the DMA) dated 28 April 2026, the Commission acknowledged that the DMA “will not be able to tackle every competition issue in the AI value chain” and that “other tools must be used, in particular the complementary tool of competition law enforcement”. The Commission will therefore probably welcome Gerard’s comments.
AI tools are analysed both as an add-on to existing markets and as an emerging standalone market (or markets), especially as regards generative AI models. While the Commission has not yet taken a definitive position on this issue, the BCA may have to if it decides to tackle the complaints received against Microsoft Copilot, as bundling or tying practices require by definition the existence of at least two standalone products. Other competition authorities are also showing an interest in this sector. For instance, on 17 July 2026 the French Competition Authority issued an opinion on the competitive functioning of the AI agents (or agentic AI) sector, building on its earlier opinion on the generative AI sector from June 2024.
While reviewing the competitive challenges raised by AI tools, competition authorities are increasingly deploying these tools in their own investigations. In January 2026, the DICE project was launched “to enhance the digital capacity of National Competition Authorities (NCAs) across 17 EU Member States” in “response to the growing impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI), data science, and digital technologies on competition enforcement”. The initiative aims to strengthen NCAs’ “readiness, skills, and institutional capacity to detect anticompetitive behaviours and enforce competition rules”. The participating NCAs are those of Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the Netherlands.
