The European Commission has designated ChatGPT as a Very Large Online Search Engine (VLOSE) under the Digital Services Act.
The trigger isn't simply "ChatGPT has a search button."
OpenAI reported 159.1 million average monthly active users in the EU, well above the DSA threshold of 45 million. The Commission considers ChatGPT a hybrid service because it responds to prompts while also searching the web.
That creates an interesting technical problem.
Search results are now generated answers
Traditional search engines return ranked pages.
A generative search system can:
Receive a prompt
Retrieve web sources
Select relevant information
Generate a response
Present that response differently for different users or repeated runs
So auditing the system isn't necessarily just checking whether an illegal URL appeared in the results.
Risk assessment may need to examine the interaction between retrieval, model generation, sources, prompts, languages, and model versions.
The DSA requires designated VLOPs and VLOSEs to conduct systemic-risk assessments, implement mitigation measures, and undergo independent compliance audits.
For ChatGPT, the additional obligations apply by January 2027.
There's also an important boundary: the designation applies to the hosted ChatGPT service. It doesn't automatically mean that privately run model weights or every smaller service using an AI model becomes a VLOSE.
The Commission's designation is therefore less about calling ChatGPT "a search engine" and more about applying the highest level of platform oversight to a service whose search results can be generated rather than simply ranked.
The real test will be whether existing DSA auditing concepts can adequately measure risk in a system where the answer itself is dynamically composed.
Full article:
https://blog.invidelabs.com/chatgpt-eu-dsa-search-engine/
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