The short answer: the WhatsApp AI bots are dead, but AI over plain SMS is alive and well. Text any question to +1 252-486-5323 (252-GUMLEAF) and a general-purpose AI answer comes back as a regular text message - 10 free answers a month, no app, no account.
Meta changed the WhatsApp Business Platform terms to prohibit general-purpose AI assistants - effective January 15, 2026 for existing providers, October 15, 2025 for new ones. ChatGPT's 1-800-ChatGPT number, Perplexity, Microsoft Copilot, Luzia, and Poke all had to shut down their WhatsApp presence. Meta's stated reasoning: the Business API was built for support tickets and booking confirmations, not for millions of free-form chatbot messages that produce no business-messaging revenue. Task-specific bots (customer service, order tracking) are still allowed; assistants are not. The only general-purpose assistant left inside WhatsApp is Meta's own.
A text message doesn't belong to a platform. SMS rides the carrier network itself - the same rails as every green bubble since 1992 - so there is no terms-of-service update that can evict an assistant from it. That's GumLeaf's home turf: it lives at a regular US phone number, answers anything, and pulls live data (weather, tides, air quality, transit departures, flight status) instead of guessing. Photo questions work too - send a picture with your question in the same message.
SMS is the most durable channel, not the fanciest. Answers are plain text sized for a phone screen, not essays with images and links. Texting GumLeaf's US number is free on effectively all US and Canadian plans; from other countries it bills as an international text. And unlike 1-800-ChatGPT, GumLeaf's free tier is 10 answers a month (30 your first month, more via referrals) with a $4.99/mo plan above it - a small operation, priced to survive, which is rather the theme of this page.
Because it's carrier-native, GumLeaf works in places no WhatsApp bot ever reached: over satellite texting (iPhone 14+ Messages via satellite, T-Mobile Starlink direct-to-cell) with zero cell coverage, on flip phones and dumb phones, and in one-bar dead zones where data dies but a text crawls through.