Meta hands WhatsApp Business setup to Claude and Codex

Meta on September 15 opened a WhatsApp Business Tools MCP server that lets coding agents such as Claude and Codex do the setup work behind a business’s WhatsApp presence. That presence is worth real money now: paid messaging on WhatsApp crossed a $2 billion annual run rate in the fourth quarter of 2025, CFO Susan Li told investors on Meta’s January earnings call, The New Stack reports.

Getting there is still fiddly. Onboarding a business sends developers back and forth between Meta’s account settings, the API documentation and their code editor while they connect and verify a phone number, configure webhooks and get the integration running. Some of that happens once. Managing message templates, testing changes and troubleshooting the setup keep pulling developers back to the same screens later.

The new server starts with access. A developer connects it to an agent, signs in with a Meta account and picks which of the businesses they already administer the agent may touch. The agent gets those businesses and nothing else, not every Meta account tied to the developer.

From there, the developer gives the agent the phone number and the display name the business wants, and the agent takes the steps needed to add the number and set up the WhatsApp account behind it. Meta then sends a one-time verification code by SMS or voice. The agent can’t fetch that code itself: the developer reads it off the phone and hands it back, and only then is the number verified and registered for sending messages.

Zoë Lieberman, who works on product marketing at Meta, framed the goal in a blog post on Tuesday as turning a string of separate API tasks into one plain-English request: “You describe what you want — your agent handles the accounts, numbers, templates, and API calls.”

Templates are where the agent stays useful after onboarding, because of a WhatsApp rule. When a customer messages a business, a 24-hour customer service window opens, and inside it the business can reply with ordinary free-form messages. Each new message from the customer restarts the clock. Once the window closes, the business generally needs a Meta-approved message template to reach that customer again, which keeps an old conversation from turning into an open channel for unsolicited messages.

So an online retailer could ask the agent for a marketing template that offers customers a coupon, or a utility template for order updates, with a header, body copy, footer and buttons. In the same conversation the developer can list the business’s existing templates, pull up a particular version, update it or delete it.

Testing follows the same rule. The agent can send a test message to check that everything behaves before customers see it, and when the recipient is outside the 24-hour window it flags that a free-form message won’t go through and offers an approved template instead.

Incoming traffic is the other half. The developer can have the agent configure the webhook that tells WhatsApp where to send customer replies and other events: the retailer’s CRM, a customer-support platform, a chatbot or an order-management system. On Meta’s platform that step depends on the receiving end being ready. When PPC Land covered Meta’s earlier developer server, it reported that subscribing an app to a webhook topic requires a live HTTPS callback URL that passes Meta’s own verification before any events flow.

The agent can also read the account as well as change it. A developer can ask what is already configured and what still needs attention, such as whether the business is missing the payment information Meta needs to charge for billable WhatsApp messages.

The agent acts with the access of the person who connected it, and Meta says actions taken through the server are recorded. Lieberman put the guardrails this way:

“Every read runs under your own viewer context, every invocation is logged, and anything that changes state requires an authenticated person rather than an app-level credential.”

In practice, reads see only what the signed-in developer can see. Writes need a person behind them, and a service token alone won’t do.

This is Meta’s second MCP server for developers this year. In June it launched Developer Tools MCP, since renamed Meta Social Technologies MCP. The rename left the server endpoint, the devtools plugin id and the devtools_ tool name prefix unchanged, so existing installs and client configurations keep working. That server works across Meta’s developer platform, WhatsApp Business API integrations included. An agent can use it to discover Graph API endpoints, search Meta’s documentation, inspect the app behind an integration and troubleshoot errors.

The WhatsApp server sits one level closer to the business itself, with tools for WhatsApp Business accounts, phone number onboarding and verification, message templates, webhook configuration and testing, and test messages. The two overlap, so a team building on WhatsApp already has two Meta servers to choose between. “They’re complementary — install both if you need both,” Lieberman writes.

Meta is rolling the WhatsApp server out gradually, so it may not be available to every developer yet, and the interface and tools remain in beta and subject to change.