India emerges as Meta AI’s biggest market on WhatsApp amid privacy-focused AI expansion

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India emerges as Meta AI’s biggest market on WhatsApp amid privacy-focused AI expansion
India emerges as Meta AI’s biggest market on WhatsApp amid privacy-focused AI expansion

Meta has confirmed that India now has the highest number of monthly active users for Meta AI on WhatsApp globally. The update comes after the launch of the company’s latest frontier AI model, Muse Spark.

Speaking during a virtual interview, Will Cathcart said, “India has the most monthly active users on Meta AI; it’s the global leader.”

Cathcart added that user engagement and conversations on Meta AI have increased significantly since the launch of Muse Spark, the company’s first closed-source AI model developed by Meta Superintelligence Labs under the leadership of chief AI officer Alexander Wang.

According to Meta, India’s large population, widespread use of WhatsApp, and growing demand for quick access to information have contributed to the platform’s rapid AI adoption. In May 2025, Meta AI had crossed 1 billion monthly active users globally, though the company has not shared updated figures since then.

To strengthen privacy, WhatsApp is introducing an “incognito mode” or disappearing private chats for users who do not want sensitive conversations linked to AI systems. Cathcart said, “The AI itself has to be secure. You just should have end-to-end encryption for an AI too.”

He explained that Meta cannot view these private AI chats or their responses, comparing the system to “a phone where we don’t know the passcode.”

However, the privacy-focused approach also limits Meta’s ability to use these conversations for AI training. “For these conversations, we can’t see what you’re saying… So, we can’t take those conversations and use them to train our models,” Cathcart said.

The privacy system is powered by Meta’s confidential computing technology using AMD CPUs and Nvidia H100 GPUs. The feature is currently being rolled out for free, while Meta continues to explore future business models for AI services.

Also read: Viksit Workforce for a Viksit Bharat

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