Meta removes language that raised scraping and AI training concerns

Meta removed a provision from its commercial terms of use that legal experts told Nieman Lab could have let the company scrape any publisher's site and use the content to train its AI models. A Meta spokesperson said the updated terms did not change how Meta crawls the web, and the company stated: "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." The removal follows Meta's 2025 win in a copyright lawsuit over training AI models on books, while other cases against AI companies, including Meta, continue.

Meta recently updated its commercial terms of use, declaring that the company can “use any content from a business account’s domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of” Meta products and services. According to legal experts interviewed by Nieman Lab https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/metas-new-commercial-terms-will-allow-the-scraping-of-news-sites-legal-experts-say/ , this looked like a “remarkable provision” that could give Meta permission to scrape the website of any publisher with a Meta business account and use the content to train the company’s AI models. While Meta defeated a high-profile lawsuit over alleged copyright infringement https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/25/federal-judge-sides-with-meta-in-lawsuit-over-training-ai-models-on-copyrighted-books/ last year, other cases https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/may/05/publishers-sue-meta-copyright-ai against AI companies, including Meta, continue. However, a Meta spokesperson insisted https://x.com/andymstone/status/2111101865769201850 that the updated terms did not reflect a change in the way Meta crawls the web. And now, The Verge reports https://www.theverge.com/tech/1013409/meta-removes-language-that-may-have-allowed-it-to-scrape-news-sites that the provision has been removed. “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,” the company said in a statement. “It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers.”