Meta’s New Business Terms May Allow Free AI Training on News
A new policy scheduled to go into effect on October 30th appears to give Meta permission to utilize outside content from business accounts for AI training and research.
Radwan AbdulhadiEditor and technology writer
Overview of Meta's New Commercial Policy
Meta's upcoming commercial policy appears to give the tech giant permission to crawl and scrape websites "associated" with the businesses that use its platforms, which includes online publishers. According to <a href="https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/metas-new-commercial-terms-will-allow-the-scraping-of-news-sites-legal-experts-say/">a report from Nieman Lab</a>, the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/legal/commercial_terms_preview">new terms</a> are scheduled to go into effect on October 30th and state that Meta can use this external content to develop, improve, research, and train its artificial intelligence products.
The updated guidelines apply to business accounts that choose to promote their content across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Under the policy, companies authorize Meta or any entity acting on its behalf to use automated software such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs associated with their products or services.
Legal Concerns and Potential Bypassing of Robots.txt
While Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts stated that the company is merely consolidating its commercial and self-serve ad terms, legal experts have raised concerns. According to experts speaking with Nieman Lab, the language could allow Meta to argue that its commercial terms supersede other blocking instructions, such as <a href="https://www.theverge.com/24067997/robots-txt-ai-text-file-web-crawlers-spiders">a site’s robots.txt file</a>.
This potential override could enable Meta to bypass formal licensing agreements and freely train its AI models on content posted by online publishers. James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell, noted that the update clearly represents permission for Meta to train AI on any content from news publisher sites and potentially deploy some of that content in competition with the publishers themselves.
Meta's Response and Executive Explanations
Meta representatives have pushed back against the interpretations presented in the reporting. Daniel Roberts asserted that there is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers and that content owners can continue using robots.txt flags to indicate their preferences, as explained in developer documentation.
Additionally, Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, <a href="https://x.com/andymstone/status/2111101865769201850">writes in a post on X</a> that the change is not intended to target news sites. Stone explained that the update is designed to ensure the platform can pull accurate information about products for sale on third-party websites when making on-platform ad and content recommendations.
Broader Context and Previous Licensing Deals
Before this policy update, Meta followed companies like <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/22/24162782/openai-licensing-deal-wall-street-journal-news-corp">OpenAI</a> in <a href="https://www.theverge.com/news/838927/meta-ai-licensing-deals-cnn-fox-news-usa-today">striking AI licensing deals with CNN</a>, Fox News, USA Today, and People Inc. However, legal analysts suggest the new terms could grant the company access to a much broader swath of online content without individual agreements.
The terms specify that businesses disagreeing with the new policies must stop all access or use of Meta products for business or commercial purposes. Furthermore, the development coincides with Meta having recently <a href="https://www.theverge.com/tech/995453/meta-one-subscriptions-ai">launched a new Meta One subscription</a> that requires businesses and creators to pay in order to include links in posts and reels. Observers note this creates a dynamic where Meta charges users to post links to content that the platform is simultaneously permitted to crawl for free.
Sources
- The VergeMeta’s new terms may allow it to train AI on news sites for free
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