Meta may use new commercial terms to avoid millions of dollars in AI licensing fees

Meta will update its commercial terms of service on October 30, requiring business accounts to allow Meta to crawl and use content from their linked websites to train AI, with no opt-out option. According to Nieman Lab, legal experts warn the terms could deprive news publishers of millions of dollars in AI licensing fees they could otherwise collect. A Meta spokesperson said the crawling method has not changed, and content owners can still block crawling via robots.txt. Ars Technica compared the old and new terms and found the new version adds wording such as "test credentials" that was not present before, and experts worry it could bypass paywalls for automated crawling.