Meta may use sweeping new commercial TOS to avoid millions in AI licensing fees

Meta is updating its commercial terms of service to require business accounts to permit AI training on their linked website content. Scheduled to take effect on October 30, the policy update offers no opt-out option, leaving businesses with the choice to accept the terms or stop using Meta services.

The updated rules authorize automated software and web scrapers to index, crawl, and pull updates from domains connected to business accounts. Legal experts told Nieman Lab that the terms could allow Meta to avoid paying millions of dollars in licensing fees for news content. Cornell Law School professor James Grimmelmann warned that the terms might let Meta train AI on publisher sites and potentially deploy that content in competition with the publishers.

Meta described the update as a streamlining effort that merely consolidates scattered crawling language into one place. A company spokesperson told Ars Technica and Nieman Lab that there is no change to how web crawlers are used and that content owners can still manage access using robots.txt instructions.

However, legal experts noted that the fresh language includes provisions for test credentials that could bypass paywalls.

Some publishers and users are now considering leaving Meta platforms in response to the