Is WhatsApp quietly removing Meta AI from groups?

If you've tried tagging @Meta AI in a WhatsApp group lately and gotten nothing back, you're not imagining it, at least according to a growing thread of Reddit posts. The question that remains unanswered is whether WhatsApp made any changes at all or there's something else going on.

There is a Reddit thread under the subreddit r/whatsapp which has compiled some instances where the @Meta AI feature hasn’t worked in group chats, with some users claiming that the feature worked fine weeks ago but now doesn't.\

Some instances have been seen on Facebook as well. This has all happened without any information being provided by either WhatsApp or Meta.

No official confirmation from WhatsApp

This is important because the Help Center of WhatsApp itself still calls the @Meta AI group, tagging an available and supported feature on its separate pages that deal with how to enable it in a group.

Meta has not released any official statements on the matter, and no tech news website has published any report on it. Thus, until one of the above happens, this is pure speculation.

A few mundane causes could account for what users are seeing. WhatsApp's Advanced Chat Privacy setting, when switched on for a specific chat, explicitly blocks @Meta AI tagging in that conversation by design, which would look exactly like the feature vanishing to anyone unaware the setting exists.

A staggered regional rollout or an outdated app version could produce the same effect for a subset of users. None of these require WhatsApp to have made any broad policy change.

The theory picking up traction alongside these reports is that WhatsApp pulled back group tagging over encryption concerns, since Meta AI can only read what's explicitly shared with it and has no access to a group's message history.