What age can my child use Meta AI? The short answer is 13, and the question arrives on its own

Almost every minimum-age question starts the same way: parents look for the app and read the store listing. With Meta AI that route goes nowhere, because the assistant is not a program you install. It is already inside WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. The question therefore does not arrive on the day your child downloads something, it arrives on the day they open a chat.

13, or the higher legal age of the country

Meta's AI terms for the European Union, in force since 13 May 2026, put it plainly: under 13 there is no access to the AI, and where the minimum legal age is higher, that age governs. It is the same two-storey logic other services use: a European floor, and on top of it whatever national law requires.

you cannot access the AI if you are under 13 years old (or the applicable minimum legal age in your country or territory)

Why the question arrives on its own

Because it lands on the same age as the apps themselves. WhatsApp's terms require you to be at least 13 to register and use the service on your own, or the greater age your country requires. Put differently: the day a child legitimately joins WhatsApp is the day they come within reach of the assistant. There is no second family decision waiting further down the line unless you deliberately make one.

An assistant that is being fought over

The AI living inside the messenger is not a technical detail, it is a competition matter. On 15 April 2026 the European Commission sent Meta a supplementary statement of objections setting out its intention to order Meta to reinstate third-party AI assistants' access to WhatsApp under the same conditions as before its policy change of 15 October 2025. The Commission preliminarily found that reopening that access in exchange for a fee is in effect equivalent to the previous ban. The procedure now covers the whole European Economic Area.

For a family that boils down to one sentence: which AI sits inside your children's chats is not decided by your household, it is decided by who wins that fight. Knowing which assistant is built into which app is now basic information, in the same way as knowing who is allowed to message them.

What this means at home

Start with a five-minute inventory: open every messaging app your child uses and check whether an assistant appears in the chat list or the search bar. Then decide what it is used for, rather than whether it exists. Then look at which parental controls each service genuinely offers, a map that is far from even and that we have walked through in a separate piece.

And if they are already using it

They almost certainly are, and they probably do not count it as using AI at all, because to them the assistant is just another contact in the list. That is where the useful conversation sits: what you write to that contact does not work like what you write to a friend. It is a company's service, with its own terms and its own handling of messages. You do not need to ban it in order to explain it.