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“In-your-face move”

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

Meta “streamlined” its commercial TOS. Legal experts warn it’s an AI power grab.

Ashley Belanger – Oct 16, 2026 3:41 PM|20

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Legal experts are sounding alarms that Meta will soon update its commercial terms to require business accounts to allow Meta to train AI on their linked website content, not just their social media posts.

Kicking in on October 30, the TOS update won’t allow businesses to opt out, instead suggesting that businesses stop using Meta services if they won’t agree to let Meta bots freely crawl their linked content.

As Nieman Lab reported Thursday, this will affect all business accounts but is particularly shocking for news publishers who could perhaps charge Meta millions in licensing fees to continually access their articles for AI training. Currently news organizations are fighting a battle with OpenAI over whether such training without licensing is fair use, and Meta’s terms seemingly risk granting it sweeping permissions, no matter which way the court leans.

“While journalism isn’t the only industry that will be affected by this update, virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account, including Nieman Lab,” the lab said.

Specifically, the updated terms say:

You authorize us (or any entity acting on our behalf) to use automated software (such as web scrapers, bots, robots, spiders, crawlers, and user agents) and create test credentials to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl the domains, web pages, or URLs (and any content available through them) that are associated with your products or services, or that are made available through your or users’ use of Meta Company Products and services, and to periodically pull updates from such domains, web pages, or URLs. Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products, services, and features provided under these Commercial Terms and any other applicable supplemental terms.

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Notably, there is no mention of AI, but it’s inferred from a single use of the word “train” and references to automated scraping and crawling.

Meta’s spokesperson told Nieman Lab that Meta has no plans to use the terms as a legal basis to ignore robots.txt instructions that block scraping on news sites. The company still allows news organizations to opt out of scraping and provides instructions on how to block crawling. A spokesperson told Ars that “there is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false.”

However, should courts affirm that AI training non-news articles is fair use, news organizations question if Meta’s stance might change, and the terms could be used to freely grab access to content by legally overriding robots.txt instructions.

Three legal experts told Nieman Lab that it’s not clear if a court would enforce the terms, but they could be “used to argue that Meta can scrape content from news sites and use that content to train the company’s AI products.” Particularly concerning, James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, told Nieman Lab that 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 platforms.

Additionally, Meta just began charging users to post links on its platforms, Nieman Lab noted. So, the terms seem to give Meta a path to first charge publishers for sharing links, then use that cash-for-links program to seize permission to scrape those links to train AI. Matt Topic, a media and intellectual property attorney at Loevy & Loevy, told Nieman Lab that “this is a remarkable provision to bury in [the] terms of service, given that this would give Meta access to material that would likely cost many millions of dollars in a licensing market.”

What actually changed with TOS update?

Meta announced the update in a blog, where the company claimed it was simply “streamlining” its commercial terms. In a statement to Nieman Lab, a spokesperson said that “language around crawling was previously scattered across different terms of use, including terms about using generative AI in ads, and this update consolidates them in one place.”

“Content owners can still manage how their content is accessed by using robots.txt,” the spokesperson said.

However, Ars compared the current terms to updates, and what Meta calls “streamlining” seems to ignore that the new terms use fresh language and grant broader provisions.

In Meta’s current commercial terms, there are no mentions of “test credentials” that, experts warned Nieman Lab, could allow Meta to bypass paywalls and automate scraping. “Test credentials” also are not mentioned in Meta’s Product Catalog Terms or Ad Creative Generative AI Terms, which are the other policies that are being combined with the commercial terms. This is fresh language that Meta seemingly only introduced this month in Self-Service Ads Terms.

A Meta spokesperson did not immediately respond to Ars’ request to clarify.

Those self-service ad terms are for users who want to grant Meta permission to scrape their content in order to generate ads. This makes a policy of requiring “test credentials” to bypass paywalls perhaps seem less egregious when it’s tailored to a niche business purpose.

Legal experts told Nieman Lab that Meta’s purported “streamlining” seems more like the antitrust concept of “tying,” where businesses force a buyer to purchase a second product as a condition of buying another. They likened it to Google’s practice of requiring websites to opt in to scraping for AI Overviews if they wanted their websites to be indexed for general search.

Previously, the only mention of crawling or bots was in Meta’s Ad Creative Generative AI Terms, and like the new ad policy, that policy also served a limited purpose. They specify that businesses consent to scraping only in connection to ad content, not for improving all of Meta’s products:

We or any entity acting on our behalf may access, index, cache, analyze, or crawl (including through use of automated software) domains, webpages or URLs provided by you for your use in connection with your ads. If you provide URLs in connection with your Ad Content, you grant us and any entity acting on our behalf the right to access, index, cache, analyze, or crawl the domains, webpages, URLs and any content available through such URLs, and to periodically pull updates from such URLs, for your use in connection with your ads or for the purpose set forth in these Terms.

In Meta’s blog, the company insisted that “these changes reduce overlap between our agreements and improve the clarity of the terms that apply to your use of our products.”

Nieman Lab is now looking to talk to aggrieved news publishers about the terms to find out if the update might trigger a widespread scale-back of news organizations’ participation in Meta platforms. At least one Meta user—Stephen Beale, the founder and editor of The Steampunk Explorer—who depends on Facebook for traffic, is already considering quitting the platform over the update. He told Nieman Lab that he knows that his website has already been “scraped to death,” but the TOS update seemed like “such an arrogant, in-your-face move on” Meta’s part.

“It just makes me angry, and I don’t want them to get away with it,” Beale said.

Ashley BelangerSenior Policy Reporter

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

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