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

Key points

• Legal experts warn that Meta's updated commercial terms, taking effect on October 30, could allow the company to train AI on content from businesses' linked websites. Businesses cannot opt out, and the update suggests they stop using Meta services if they refuse.
• The changes are said to affect all business accounts, with news publishers particularly exposed, as they could otherwise charge Meta millions in licensing fees.
• Meta says it is only consolidating existing crawling language and that robots.txt instructions still apply.