The technology launched in the US back in 2023 but it's debut in Europe was paused amid concerns over privacy and data protection issues however, the company is now pressing ahead with adding Meta AI as a limited text-based chat feature to WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger across 41 European countries and 21 overseas territories including Iceland, Norway and Switzerland.

Meta spokesperson Ellie Heatrick told The Verge: "This launch follows almost a year of intensive engagement with various European regulators and for now, we are only offering a text-only model in the region which wasn’t trained on first-party data from users in the EU.

"We will continue to work collaboratively with regulators so that people in Europe have access to and are properly served by Meta’s AI innovations that are already available to the rest of the world."

Meta's AI chatbot has been trained on user-generated content in the US but faced pushback from European Union regulators over potential privacy breaches.

TechCrunch reports the version launching in the EU is able to go ahead because it has not been trained on data from users in the EU.

Meta’s innovation communications manager Anna Dack told the publication: "The model powering these Meta AI features wasn’t trained on first-party data from users in the EU.

The AI assistant will only function as a chatbot for European users and cannot be used to generate or edit images or ask answer questions about images.

A limited version of Meta AI has previously launched in a number of countries across the Middle East and Africa.