Meta Platforms is set to test new subscription models across its apps, including Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp in the coming months, according to a report from TechCrunch on Tuesday. 

The report, confirmed by a Meta spokesperson, said the subscriptions are expected to “unlock more productivity and creativity” by giving paid users access to more features and expanded AI capabilities. 

Meta’s recently acquired suite of general AI agents under Manus will also be scaled as part of the subscription plans. Meta Platforms bought Manus — a Singapore-based developer of AI agents founded in China — in December for a reported $2 billion.

With its new subscription plans, Meta could be seeking a return on investment from its massive spending on AI talent and acquisitions last year, even before the Manus purchase. 

While Meta has been developing large language models under the Llama umbrella, those have been open-sourced. That means general access to Llama has remained free, unlike with paid plans from AI leaders like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

Other features offered as part of Meta’s paid plans could include full access to its AI-powered short-form video experience Vibes, which allows users to create and remix AI-generated videos. 

While Vibes has been free since its launch in 2025, the new subscription model would grant free access to its basic version, with the option to pay for additional features. 

The subscriptions will be separate from Meta Verified, a paid product rolled out by the company in 2023 that gave content creators and businesses a verified badge, 24/7 direct support, protection against impersonation, search optimization, and more.

Meta told TechCrunch that it plans to listen to its user community and gather feedback as it rolls out subscriptions in the coming months.

Meta won its high-profile antitrust case against the Federal Trade Commission, which had accused the company of holding a monopoly in social networking.

In a memorandum opinion released Tuesday, Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., said the FTC failed to prove its argument. The case, initially filed by the FTC five years ago, centered on Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.

“Whether or not Meta enjoyed monopoly power in the past, though, the agency must show that it continues to hold such power now,” Boasberg said in the filing. “The Court’s verdict today determines that the FTC has not done so. A judgment so stating shall issue this day.”

Boasberg dismissed the case in 2021, saying the agency didn’t have enough evidence to prove “Facebook holds market power.” In August of that year, the FTC filed an amended complaint with more details about the company’s user numbers and metrics relative to competitors like Snapchat, the now-defunct Google+ social network and Myspace.

After reviewing the amendments, Boasberg in 2022 ruled that the case could proceed, saying the FTC had presented more details than before.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former operating chief Sheryl Sandberg, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom and other current and former Meta executives all testified in the trial, which began in April.

The social media company’s shares were little changed on Tuesday. The stock is up about 2% for the year, badly underperforming broader indexes and most of its megacap tech peers.

“The Court’s decision today recognizes that Meta faces fierce competition,” the company said in a statement. “Our products are beneficial for people and businesses and exemplify American innovation and economic growth. We look forward to continuing to partner with the Administration and to invest in America.” 

The FTC didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.  

The ruling comes a little over two months after Google avoided the harshest possible penalty from an antitrust case it lost last year. While Google was found to hold an illegal monopoly in its core market of internet search, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta decided the company would not be forced to sell its Chrome browser, bucking the Department of Justice’s request. Google was, however, ordered to loosen its hold on search data.

In the Meta case, the FTC claimed the company shouldn’t have been allowed to buy Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, and the agency called for those units to be divested. The commission also alleged that there were no major alternatives for apps like Facebook and Instagram that people use to communicate with friends and family in a online, social space.

However, a major challenge for the FTC, according to the judge, was in proving that Meta is breaking antitrust law today, not years ago when the primary use of social networks was very different and based on sharing other kinds of content.

“To win the permanent injunction that it seeks here, the FTC must prove a current or imminent legal violation,” he wrote.

Boasberg ultimately sided with Meta’s argument that the technology industry has evolved since the early days of Facebook, and the company now faces a wide variety of competitors like TikTok.

“While each of Meta’s empirical showings can be quibbled with, they all tell a consistent story: people treat TikTok and YouTube as substitutes for Facebook and Instagram, and the amount of competitive overlap is economically important,” Boasberg wrote. “Against that unmistakable pattern, the FTC offers no empirical evidence of substitution whatsoever.”

Former U.S. Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan said Monday that Facebook “panicked” when making the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp as smartphone use took off.

“It saw companies like Instagram and WhatsApp experiencing astronomical growth, and that’s the point at which it resorted to this buy-or-bury scheme where, if it couldn’t outcompete a rival, it either bought them out or cut them off its network,” Khan said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, begins a trial with the FTC on Monday. The government alleges that the company monopolized the personal social networking market with its $1 billion acquisition of Instagram in 2012 and $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp in 2014.

Meta did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

The trial could result in the social media giant divesting the two companies. Meta has filed a pretrial brief detailing its disagreement with the FTC and reiterating that it believes the company does not have a monopoly.

“There’s no expiration date when it comes to the illegality of the transaction,” Khan said. “I think there is a way in which the entire social networking ecosystem looks different today because Facebook was permitted to go out and make these acquisitions.”

The case is, at its core, about “free and fair trade,” Khan added. Though no settlement has been reached, she said there’s always a possibility of a settlement before the case concludes.

With President Donald Trump regularly holding court with tech executives, Khan said she’s “glad” that Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts to dismiss the case have been, thus far, unsuccessful.

Zuckerberg donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund, co-hosted an inaugural ball and has reportedly met with the president multiple times since January.

“Until the trial is over and until we actually get a liability verdict and then a remedy, we’re all going to have to wait and see,” Khan said.

Meta said Friday that it blocked a “small cluster” of WhatsApp accounts linked to an Iranian hacking group that was targeting officials associated with President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump.

The company said in a blog post that the bogus WhatsApp accounts appeared to originate from the Iranian threat actor dubbed APT42, which other tech companies like Google previously described as an “Iranian state-sponsored cyber espionage actor.” The group has targeted various activists, non-government organizations, media outlets and others.

Meta said the scheme was intended to exploit “political and diplomatic officials, and other public figures, including some associated with administrations of President Biden and former President Trump.” The campaign also targeted people in Israel, Palestine, Iran and the U.K.

With less than 75 days until the November election, Meta is attracting increased public attention due to ways that Facebook has been exploited and manipulated in the two prior presidential campaigns. The company said it hasn’t seen any evidence that the accounts of any WhatsApp users were compromised, and it’s sharing more information with “law enforcement and our industry peers.”

Meta said its security team was able to spot APT42’s involvement after analyzing suspicious messages that an unspecified number of users reported receiving from the fraudulent WhatsApp accounts.

“These accounts posed as technical support for AOL, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft,” Meta said in the blog post. “Some of the people targeted by APT42 reported these suspicious messages to WhatsApp using our in-app reporting tools.”

The Trump campaign said earlier this month that a foreign actor had compromised its network and illegally obtained internal communications. Microsoft also said at the time that it identified several Iranian hacking groups that were attempting to influence the U.S. presidential election, and that a group  affiliated with APT42 “sent a spear phishing email in June to a high-ranking official on a presidential campaign from the compromised email account of a former senior advisor.”

In 2019, Microsoft said it had identified several hackers linked to the Iranian government who were believed to have targeted an unspecified U.S. presidential campaign in addition to other government officials and media.

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Meta on Thursday announced its free artificial intelligence assistant, Meta AI, is rolling out across its social media platforms WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger.

The assistant can answer questions, create animations and generate images, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video. Meta AI was built on the company’s latest large language model called Meta Llama 3, which was also announced Thursday.

The AI tool is Meta’s competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini but, in a unique twist, Meta has also partnered with Google and Microsoft to provide results from both companies’ search engines.

“We believe that Meta AI is now the most intelligent AI assistant that you can freely use,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in the video.

Shares of Meta are up more than 2% Thursday.

Meta AI is built into the search box of the WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger apps so users can easily ask questions that can be answered through the new tool.

For instance, the company said users can ask Meta AI for restaurant recommendations, help planning a vacation or inspiration to decorate a new apartment.

Meta AI is also available on the website “meta.ai,” where users can ask the assistant for help with tasks like solving a math problem or writing a professional email, according to the release. Users can log their conversations for future reference.

Meta said the assistant’s image-generation feature will be available in beta on WhatsApp and the MetaAI website. Users will see an image appear as they start typing and MetaAI will provide prompts to help change or refine the image. The images can also be animated into a GIF that users can share.

Meta first introduced Meta AI in beta at its Connect event in September. The assistant is rolling out in English across more than a dozen countries including the U.S., Canada, New Zealand and Australia, starting Thursday.

It’s been almost a decade since Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg shocked the tech world, announcing his company’s agreement to spend $19 billion on WhatsApp, a popular messaging app with a tiny business.

Since then, WhatsApp has remained somewhat of an anachronism. Usage has continued to grow, with more than 2 billion people now counting on the app to chat with friends and family, up from 450 million at the time of the acquisition. But it’s still not much of a moneymaker.

Unlike Instagram, which Facebook bought in 2012 for the much tidier sum of roughly $1 billion, WhatsApp doesn’t show ads, which is Zuckerberg’s core business. It’s also unrelated to his company’s hugely expensive pivot to the metaverse or its effort to catch up to TikTok with its short video product, Reels.

But the company now known as Meta has no intention of sidelining WhatsApp. Rather, Zuckerberg regularly touts the value of the asset and its potential to expand, boasting on Meta’s latest earnings call about the 200 million people who use the WhatsApp Business app, which helps companies communicate with clients. He told CNBC’s Jim Cramer in June 2022 that WhatsApp represents the “next chapter” for Meta.

To parlay its massive user base into a product that contributes in a big way to the bottom line, WhatsApp needs more large businesses across the globe to rely on the service as a main way to converse with customers. For each conversation, companies pay in the range of a half-cent to 15 cents, depending on the kind of chat and the country in which the exchange takes place.

“It’s been clear for many years that people are trying to connect with businesses on WhatsApp,” said Alice Newton-Rex, the unit’s product director, in an interview with CNBC. “If you go to India or Brazil and you look around, you’ll see WhatsApp numbers posted up in shop windows everywhere. This is how businesses want to engage with their customers.”

Consumers in India, for example, use WhatsApp to book Uber rides and get movie recommendations on their Netflix accounts.

Newton-Rex joined WhatsApp four years ago, leaving her high-level position at London-based financial firm WorldRemit for the new gig. At the time, WhatsApp only had 15 product managers, a number that’s since ballooned to 90.

The product group is now tasked with building features that can unlock WhatsApp’s business in a substantial way and in helping WhatsApp fulfill the potential that Zuckerberg has long seen in the app.

Newton-Rex said Zuckerberg has been “a big part of the team,” adding that he regularly speaks with Will Cathcart, the current head of WhatsApp.

“He’s a big part of our strategy,” she said about Zuckerberg’s support of WhatsApp and its road map.

WhatsApp’s popularity around the world is undeniable. In countries like Brazil, India and Indonesia, people use it to chat with family and friends and stay updated on current affairs. There’s particular appeal in countries that historically lacked robust telecommunications infrastructure, as WhatsApp has made it feasible for people in those regions to affordably communicate via smartphone.

“Back in 2009, it was extremely expensive to send a text message, and if you wanted to make a call or particularly an international call, that might set you back hundreds of dollars,” Newton-Rex said. “WhatsApp changed all that.”

Newton-Rex recalled the time a member of the app’s research group compared WhatsApp to oxygen.

“I think the idea that it’s sort of everywhere and it’s effortless to use, you maybe don’t think too deeply about using it, but you would be in real trouble if someone took it away,” she said.

The business challenge for WhatsApp dates back to its origins. Co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton publicly lambasted the advertising industry in a 2012 blog post, writing that “no one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they’ll see tomorrow.” 

In the years after the Facebook deal, Koum and Acton reportedly clashed with executives over issues related to data privacy and monetizing WhatsApp. Acton left in 2017, and Koum followed him out the door a year later.

It’s not just an issue of privacy and morals. As Williamson noted, WhatsApp’s core function as an encrypted platform for people to send each other private messages isn’t particularly “conducive to advertising.” Does a user really want a McDonald’s promotion to pop up alongside private messages with family members?

Yet throughout its almost two decades, Facebook has never had much of a business outside of ads, even as it’s expanded into consumer gadgets and the metaverse and, in the case of WhatsApp, getting companies to pay for messaging.

The plan is five years in the making. Meta kick-started its WhatsApp Business app in 2018, pitching it as a way for companies to more easily communicate with users through verified commercial accounts and a suite of in-app tools. In June, Meta said the WhatsApp Business app had quadrupled in the past three years to 200 million monthly active users.

Small companies can use the app for free or, depending on the country, pay a monthly subscription for added features like the ability to build a WhatsApp website, and to access a corporate account on up to 10 devices. Larger companies can pay for more expansive messaging campaigns and features to help them provide more customer service and support to big audiences via the WhatsApp Business platform.

With the upper-tier service, Meta charges per conversation, and the fee varies. In Brazil, for instance, a brief authentication conversation in which users are prompted to enter one-time passcodes for verification could cost a company 3.15 cents, while more complicated and extended marketing conversations detailing new promotions or special deals may cost 6.25 cents.

Meta said in its most recent annual report that sales in the company’s “Family of Apps-other revenue” segment, which houses the WhatsApp Business platform and other revenue sources like the net fees Meta receives from developers using its payment infrastructure, grew 12% year over year to $808 million in 2022.

While companies can’t run online ads on WhatsApp, they can buy a special kind of ad that’s now core to WhatsApp’s business strategy called “click-to-message,” which essentially redirects Instagram and Facebook users to WhatsApp to initiate an immediate conversation, Newton-Rex said.

It’s a strategy Meta is deploying more broadly. Zuckerberg said last year that the company’s click-to-message ad products running across WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram are generating about $9 billion in annualized revenue. Most of those sales stem from the company’s Messenger app, which was first to offer that type of ad, but Zuckerberg said that the WhatsApp-specific click-to-message ads “just passed a $1.5 billion run rate, growing more than 80% year over year.” Meta says that all rolls up to total ad revenue and is not housed within WhatsApp.

More recently, Zuckerberg said during Meta’s first-quarter 2023 earnings call that the company’s click-to-message ads reached $10 billion in annualized revenue and added that “paid messaging on WhatsApp — has grown by 40% quarter over quarter,” without giving a revenue figure.

In addition to the newer ad products, Newton-Rex also highlighted WhatsApp’s Channels feature, which Meta debuted in June. The new tool, which is akin to a similar feature available in the Telegram messaging app, is intended to function like a “private broadcast service,” separate from the core WhatsApp messaging that takes place between friends and family members. It lets organizations and power users create their own channels to send messages or post updates and polls to large groups of people.

Although Channels is currently only available in a few countries, including Colombia and Singapore, Newton-Rex said Meta has bigger plans in store for the product and is considering ways to make money from it.

“Maybe you’ll be able to subscribe to a channel and you’d pay a small fee to hear from a news outlet or some celebrity who you cared about,” Newton-Rex said. “That could include also allowing channel owners to promote their own channel in our directory.”

As a broadcast tool, Channels isn’t an encrypted service. In the future, WhatsApp may allow groups like nonprofits or health organizations to ensure communications are encrypted for user or patient protection, the company said.

In looking for other ways to make money from Channels, ads could be an option, as there’s now a way for companies to run promotions without forcing them into a stream of confidential messages.

“We’re looking at a whole range of different monetization opportunities,” Newton-Rex said. “We haven’t fixed on any one thing yet.”

Researchers have found that the people in the U.S. most likely to use WhatsApp come from immigrant communities with extended family in other countries. The Pew Research Center has previously detailed that WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app used by Hispanic Americans.

For “a lot of people around the world who don’t use so many different internet services, WhatsApp is their gateway into having interactions on the internet,” Newton-Rex said.

Because WhatsApp uses encryption technology, it’s also attractive for people in countries with more repressive government regimes, while consumers in the U.S. are generally comfortable using Apple’s iMessage as well as direct messages on Facebook and X, formerly known as Twitter.

Newton-Rex said part of WhatsApp’s marketing strategy in the U.S. focuses on the app’s encryption technology, because data privacy often “comes up as an absolute top concern” for users. Last year, the company debuted a major promotional campaign highlighting WhatsApp’s encryption features.

Meta has been hammered in recent years by a number of data privacy blunders, such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal, scarring the company’s reputation.

“People really do know how important end-to-end encryption is,” Newton-Rex said. “They know that they don’t want their messages to be vulnerable to hackers, criminals, oppressive governments or anyone else who’s trying to listen in.”

Meanwhile, as Meta and other tech giants pour billions of dollars into generative artificial intelligence, Zuckerberg recently said his company plans to include more advanced chatbots into WhatsApp and other messaging tools.

Newton-Rex said Meta’s push into generative AI could assist in the development of more kinds of “business applications.”

“I think that messaging is going to be the main way that people interact with generative AI in future,” she said. “Imagine being able to have a really easy, instant, real-time conversation whenever you wanted to get customer service or to buy something with a business who you wanted to transact with. But it’s not just business applications.”

The global business messaging space is currently worth about $32 billion and is dominated by SMS, or short message service, technology that’s used to send things like status updates on airplane flight changes, Mobilesquared’s Lane said.

Lane said WhatsApp has the opportunity to offer more compelling ways for businesses to communicate with customers beyond short, simple text messages.

“For example, if you’re a restaurant, you can put your whole menu, different pages of your menu on WhatsApp,” Lane said. “The experience that you can have on a website or on an app, you can now have that within the messaging experience.”

That looks like a far-off promise, at least in the North American market. Williamson from Insider Intelligence said she does “not see any leap in usage of WhatsApp in the U.S.” in the near future.

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