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Welcome back to AI, Tech & Money. This is Trishla Ostwal, ADWEEK’s AI reporter, back in New York City after a week in London, where I moderated a panel at Semrush Spotlight. I also watched OpenAI make the case that the most effective method to sell ChatGPT to businesses in Europe is the old-fashioned way: in person, at events.
Online, OpenAI is moving a lot faster. It said Wednesday that over 100,000 advertisers have now run campaigns on ChatGPT, and it’s expanding ChatGPT Ads into 26 more countries.
But most of my week went to Meta, which has been in the ads game nearly two decades longer than OpenAI. I read its new business terms more times than I’d like to admit, and the short version is this: from Oct. 30, if Meta’s AI messes up your ad, that’s on you. Buyers I spoke with said Meta’s AI is already reworking their ads without asking. More on that in a minute.
The new terms land in a busy week for Meta. A New Mexico judge on Wednesday ordered Meta to pay $25 billion after a jury found in September that Facebook misled users about how much control they had over their data. Meta is expected to appeal. The same day, Meta also reported $64.6 billion in third-quarter revenue, beating Wall Street’s estimate of about $63.3 billion.
OpenAI wants a bigger number on the board, too. It’s in talks to raise about $30 billion at a valuation above $1.4 trillion, according to Reuters, up from the $852 billion it hit in March after a record $122 billion round.
The timing is the tell. OpenAI wants to price the round before Anthropic’s expected mid-November IPO, when Anthropic’s disclosures will let investors compare the two businesses side by side.
Anthropic’s own number has been sliding: Investors at its Oct. 14 investor day discussed a valuation around $1.5 trillion, down from the roughly $2 trillion it had sought, after third-quarter growth slowed.
The Top Line
- After previously targeting $3 billion in ad revenue for 2026, Netflix announced it’s expected to hit $2.7 billion for the year .
- Cuttable, a startup that turns brands’ photo and video assets into AI ads across Meta, has raised $20 million in Series A .
- Kohl’s brings back Ellie Kemper for holiday ad campaign .
- New Mexico judge orders Meta to pay state $25 billion for misleading users about their data privacy.
The Quant
From January to July, news sites made up an average of 29.5% of ChatGPT’s cited sources in the U.K., according to Semrush’s AI Visibility Index shared with me; in the U.S., the number fell to 19.6%. ChatGPT had the highest news share of the four AI platforms each month, in both markets, ahead of Google’s Gemini, AI overviews and AI mode. Moreover, every platform leaned more heavily on news in the U.K. ChatGPT isn’t necessarily favoring news sites by design, according to Semrush. I sat down with Eli Goodman, Semrush’s svp, product solutions, at its Spotlight event. He said the difference in citations across both the markets is tied to how people in each market consume news. In the U.S., news content is more blended with opinion, and trust in the media has fallen over the past decade or more compared with the U.K., he said.
People in the U.K. consume more news, Goodman added, and because LLMs try to reason like humans, they end up mirroring that behavior. With news accounting for close to 30% of ChatGPT’s U.K. citations, Goodman said, PR has become an important part of how brands are viewed as sources.
Deep Learning: Advertisers Pull Meta Ads That Have Had Unwanted AI Glow-ups
Meta’s AI has been editing advertisers’ ads on its platforms.
Bookshop.org, the online bookseller, found out the hard way. In a post on Threads, the bookseller said that an automated account update from Meta opted it into a generative AI feature, which added an AI-generated illustration to its human-made ad without its knowledge.
“This particular ad was ‘enhanced’ (or ruined, really) by Meta without our knowledge after an account update opted us in to their new ad features last week,” the company wrote on Threads. It has since turned off all of Meta’s AI ad features.
Advertisers have had their issues with Meta’s AI features for a long time. What appears to be more recent developments are Meta’s AI making enhancements without being asked, and the liability for any inaccuracies landing on the advertiser.
“As we saw with Bookshop, these automatic genAI revisions can be antithetical to brands’ strategies and their values, and [can] publish without a brand even knowing it,” said Emarketer’s senior analyst Asa Hiken. “It’s the brand that stands to lose here; consumers are unaware of Meta’s ad policies and are thus likely to assume that the brand willingly used AI.”
Digital agency Exverus told me Meta’s AI is tacking on sitelinks, translating copy, and spinning up AI images and carousels out of a brand’s own photos, sometimes on ads where advertisers did not switch the feature on.
Starting Oct. 30, all that is legally the advertiser’s problem. Under Meta’s updated Commercial Terms, the contract that governs every business using its products, advertisers who run ads on Meta will be “solely responsible” for whatever its AI features create or change, including features Meta switches on. This language sits in a new section, ‘AI Features,’ that does not exist in the current version.
Previously, according to the terms, liability stood with advertisers as well but only if they chose to use Meta’s AI tools.
“You may choose to use the Ad Creative AIs in your sole discretion and that your use of the Ad Creative AIs may result in Output that is digitally created, enhanced or altered and that such Output may be inaccurate, incomplete, misleading, offensive, and/or inappropriate,” the terms read. “You also recognize and agree that you–not Meta–are responsible for your use of any Output, and/or any actions you take in relation to your Ad Content.”
A Meta spokesperson did not directly address whether the new terms make advertisers liable for AI features they never switched on. The spokesperson added advertisers can turn off individual Advantage+ features in Ads Manager at any time.
Meta concedes the AI tools can get it wrong. The new terms say its AI features “may make mistakes and may not always produce accurate, complete, or suitable results.” It goes on to say that “any and all risks” are on the advertiser.
“If you do not agree to the updated terms, you may stop all access or use of our Products for business or commercial purposes,” the term update reads.
Meta framed the update has housekeeping. A Meta spokesperson said it is folding its existing generative AI ad terms into its main ad terms but did not directly comment on the AI Features section in its new terms.
“[Meta is] going to opt you into AI features, and they’re doing so a month before Black Friday, Cyber Monday—the biggest key season of the year,” said David Dweck, president at marketing agency Go Fish Digital. “Meta knows that they’ve got advertisers a bit over a barrel here and are going to be forced into it.”
Go Fish Digital has its legal team reviewing the terms and has reached out to Meta, but Dweck said the agency won’t tell clients to pull back in Q4, when brands expect to generate high volumes of sales from Meta.
“It’s kind of the tax of advertising on Meta,” he said.
At Exverus, the problem is already showing up in live campaigns.
“Meta auto-applies the enhancements, and many of the options are tucked away in hidden or collapsed menus,” said Ryan Adams, the agency’s paid search & social specialist. “If every one of those isn’t manually unchecked, the enhancements still apply.”
Even after several rounds of quality checks, Exverus has had to pull live ads to strip out changes that slipped through, including added sitelinks, language translations, and AI-generated images or carousels built from the brand’s own media. “Meta puts the responsibility squarely on the advertiser, even when Meta’s own tools applied the enhancements,” Adams said.
Some buyers are so wary of unwanted AI enhancements that they consistently turn off Meta’s Advantage+.
“By switching these AI features on by default and shifting 100% of the legal liability onto the advertiser, Meta creates huge operational risks,” said Kayla Loecker, director of operations, programmatic at AdCellerant. “That’s why we systematically turn off Meta’s default AI automation across every campaign—we ensure ads hit the exact target audience and geo requested without unwanted AI modifications, waste, or legal liability.”
Meta did not respond to multiple specific questions regarding advertisers’ experiences with its AI features.
Meta’s new terms also give the social media giant more reach into advertisers’ own websites. Businesses authorize Meta to send “web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents” to sites associated with their products and services, and use what Meta collects to “ provide, develop, improve, research, and maintain advertising and business products.”
“We’ve heard you and want to clarify: the crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we’ve clarified that in the terms themselves,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers. As always, content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences. This is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences.”
Deals, Deals, Deals
- Salesforce is to buy Braze for $5.66 billion.
- The Federal Trade Commission has approved Publicis Groupe’s $2.2 billion acquisition of LiveRamp.
- AI marketing startup, Different, snags $48 million in seed funding .
- Abbott Laboratories plans to spin off its nutrition unit, which makes Similac , to focus on core healthcare products.
- Kroger’s former CEO testifies that the grocer did what regulators required on its blocked $24.6 billion Albertsons merger, as Albertsons sues for damages.
- Retail media platform Kevel raises $52 million.
Revolving Door
- Sebnem Erim joins Diageo as CMO as the North American division turned in the spirits giant’s weakest results in 2026.
- Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, will leave Meta next year after 15+ years.
- OpenAI’s ad team has grown to roughly 140 people , with nearly half hired between July and September 2026.
- Jenna Bromberg is appointed CMO of Arby’s .