Meta's new commercial terms will allow it to scrape website content to train AI
Meta updated its commercial terms, removing language that had been interpreted as allowing it to scrape website content to train AI. Neiman Lab and Cornell University law professor James Grimmelmann previously argued that the clause was intended to let Meta use scraped content for free to train AI, and could bypass blocking instructions in robots.txt. Meta Vice President of Communications Andy Stone and spokesperson Daniel Roberts had responded that Meta's use of web crawlers had not changed, and this terms update directly removed the disputed language. Other reports said that when Meta updated its business services terms, it had stated it had the right to use content from business account domains, web pages or URLs to train AI models, and deleted that language after controversy; Meta said the update was merely a consolidation of existing advertising terms, not an expansion of crawler behavior, and that the revised terms limit crawlers and data collection to advertising and business products only, while site owners can still control crawler permissions via robots.txt.
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