India has emerged as the largest user base of the Meta AI chatbot on WhatsApp, which has witnessed record conversations globally after the launch of the tech company’s new frontier AI model, Muse Spark, Will Cathcart, global chief of WhatsApp at Meta Inc, told ET.
“India has the most monthly active users on Meta AI; it’s the global leader,” he said in an exclusive virtual interview.
“The number of people in India, their need to access information, the familiarity with WhatsApp, and now (with) the privacy feature, I think we have this really huge opportunity to serve a lot of people in India and see tremendous usage,” Cathcart said.
Frequency of chats with Meta AI has grown multifold “since Muse Spark launched,” he noted.
Muse Spark is the company’s first closed-source model developed by the Meta Superintelligence Labs under new chief AI officer Alexander Wang.
In May 2025, Meta AI had crossed 1 billion monthly active users globally. The company has not disclosed updated user numbers since then.
To protect the privacy of users, WhatsApp is introducing ‘incognito mode’, or private/disappearing chats for those who are not comfortable with sharing their personal information with AI.
“When you look at the types of things people ask AI, they’re increasingly revealing sensitive information, financial questions, health-related queries,” Cathcart said, adding that users have been seeking ways to interact with AI without exposing personal data.
“The AI itself has to be secure. You just should have end-to-end encryption for an AI too,” he said. “We’ve built something where we can’t see what you say and we can’t see what the answers are… You would think of it as a phone where we don’t know the passcode.”
Cathcart described it as a first-of-its-kind approach among major AI providers.
However, the privacy feature comes with a trade-off. It limits Meta’s ability to train and improve its AI models due to the absence of a direct feedback loop.
“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 acknowledged.
However, he said, “Muse Spark will continue to get better because there are other ways people interact with it,” adding that the company will rely on other data sources to improve performance.
WhatsApp's incognito feature is built on Meta’s “private processing” technology which relies on a special “confidential computing” hardware built with AMD CPUs and Nvidia’s H100 GPUs.
The feature is currently being rolled out for free with no immediate plans to monetise Meta AI, but business models are still emerging.
“Meta, across the board, is figuring out business models and how things work for heavy AI usage,” said Cathcart, who is a part of the Mark Zuckerberg-led tech giant’s top leadership team.
In January 2026, Meta effectively barred any third-party AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot from operating on its platform when it updated its WhatsApp Business API terms. However, the company has been juggling lawsuits in global courts for breach of antitrust rules.
Clarifying WhatsApp’s stance on competition, Cathcart said, “There is tremendous competition and openness in the AI space. There are a lot of apps. People are not having trouble downloading their app and using it.”
WhatsApp business platform was built for businesses to interact directly with their customers and not for AI services, he added.
