Meta Platforms is set to roll out updated commercial terms on October 30 that legal experts say could give the company broad authority to scrape business accounts' linked website content — including news articles — for artificial intelligence training purposes, without paying licensing fees.
The update, first reported by Ars Technica, affects all business accounts on Meta's platforms. Businesses that do not agree to the new terms are told to stop using Meta services rather than offered a formal opt-out.
Meta has characterized the change as a consolidation effort. "These changes reduce overlap between our agreements and improve the clarity of the terms that apply to your use of our products," the company said in a blog post.
A Meta spokesperson told Ars Technica that "there is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false." The company also told Nieman Lab that it has no plans to use the terms as a legal basis to override robots.txt instructions blocking scraping on news sites, and that content owners can still manage crawling access through robots.txt.
Legal experts, however, warn the new language extends well beyond what Meta's previous terms permitted. Where prior policies tied crawling and scraping permissions to specific, limited purposes — such as generating ads — the updated commercial terms authorize Meta or any entity acting on its behalf to use "automated software such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents" and to "create test credentials" to access any domains, web pages, or URLs associated with a business's products or services. The terms further state that Meta "may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of" its products and services.
The phrase "test credentials" is notably absent from the terms being consolidated, appearing instead only in a separate seller agreement covering Meta's e-commerce products — a document not referenced in Meta's blog post announcing the update.
Three legal experts told Nieman Lab that it remains unclear whether a court would enforce the terms, but the language could be used to argue that Meta has permission to scrape publisher content and use it to train AI products.
James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, told Nieman Lab that under the terms, Meta could "train AI on any content from their sites" and possibly "deploy some of that content, even in competition with the publishers themselves" on Meta's own platforms.
Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy and Loevy, told Nieman Lab that "this is a remarkable provision to bury in terms of service, given that this would give Meta access to material that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market."
The update arrives as news organizations are already contesting whether AI companies' use of their content for training constitutes fair use — a dispute currently playing out in litigation against OpenAI. Should courts rule that such training is not fair use for news content, Meta's terms could still be cited as a contractual workaround.
Legal experts also drew a comparison to the antitrust concept of "tying." Meta recently introduced a program charging users to post links on its platforms, and critics note the structure could allow Meta to first collect fees from publishers for link distribution, then use those same links as a basis for claiming permission to scrape the underlying content.
Google faced similar scrutiny for previously requiring websites to opt into scraping for AI Overviews as a condition of general search indexing — a practice it has since modified to allow opt-outs.
Nieman Lab said it is seeking comment from news publishers about whether the terms update may prompt a broad pullback from Meta platforms, signaling that the full industry response to the October 30 deadline is still taking shape.