Meta drops contested AI-crawling language from business terms
Meta updated its commercial terms for business accounts, effective October 30, to have them authorize Meta to use scrapers, bots and crawlers on domains and pages “associated with” their products or services, with the content usable to “develop, improve, research, train” Meta products. Nieman Lab and legal scholars, including Cornell's James Grimmelmann, warned this could let Meta freely train AI on news publishers' sites and argue its commercial terms override robots.txt blocking instructions. Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts and VP of communications Andy Stone denied any change to crawler behavior, calling the update a consolidation of ads and business terms; on October 17 Meta removed the “train” sentence entirely, saying the terms applied only to its ads and business products and grant no new rights superseding content owners' preferences.
Platforms are testing commercial contracts, rather than copyright rulings, as a route to AI training data, which directly shapes publishers' leverage.