Meta has removed a provision from its updated commercial terms of use that legal experts warned could have allowed it to scrape publishers’ websites and use the content to train its AI models.
The revised terms had stated that Meta could use any content from a business account’s domains, web pages or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train and maintain the integrity of its products and services. Legal experts interviewed by Nieman Lab described it as a remarkable provision that could effectively give Meta permission to crawl the site of any publisher holding a Meta business account and feed that material into its AI systems.
A Meta spokesperson initially maintained that the updated terms did not reflect any change in how the company crawls the web. The Verge has since reported that the language has been removed. In a statement, Meta said it had listened to feedback and wanted to clarify that the consolidated crawling terms applied only to its ads and business products, adding that it had made this clear in the terms themselves and that its use of web crawlers remains unchanged.
The episode comes as copyright disputes over AI training continue. While Meta defeated a high-profile infringement lawsuit last year, other cases against AI companies, including Meta, remain ongoing.
