Recently, Meta updated its commercial terms of use, including a sweeping new web scraping clause. Meta declared it could use content from any business account’s domains, web pages, or URLs. The company claimed it needed this access to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain its products and services. However, this language sparked immediate artificial intelligence (AI) training concerns.
Legal Experts Sound the Alarm
Legal experts quickly scrutinized the update. In a recent interview, experts reportedly called the update a “remarkable provision”. They warned publishers about the underlying risks. Specifically, this language gave Meta permission to scrape the website of any publisher holding a Meta business account. Consequently, Meta could use this scraped content to train its AI models.
Last year, Meta successfully defeated a high-profile copyright infringement lawsuit. Meanwhile, several other legal cases against Meta and other AI companies continue today.
Meta Removes the Controversial Web Scraping Clause
Following the public scrutiny, Meta walked back the changes. Yesterday, on October 17, 2026, The Verge reported that the company removed the controversial provision entirely. Before the removal, a Meta spokesperson strongly insisted that the updated terms did not actually change how the company crawls the web.
This is false. There’s no change to how Meta uses web crawlers. As always, content owners can use robots.txt flags to indicate their preferences. This update is designed to make sure we’re able to pull accurate information about products for sale on third-party websites when making on-platform ad and content recommendations, not about scraping news sites.
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) October 16, 2026
To address the backlash, Meta released an official statement. The company stated that it heard the concerns and wanted to clarify its position. Furthermore, Meta explained that the consolidated crawling terms only applied to its ads and business products. The company has now clarified this explicitly within the terms themselves. Finally, Meta reiterated that this specific change does not alter how the company utilizes web crawlers.
