Meta Removes Controversial AI Training Clause From Business Terms

On Oct. 18, 2026, Meta removed a provision from its updated business terms that said it could use content from business account domains, webpages, or URLs to develop and train its products and services. The language had drawn scrutiny from legal experts who said it could allow Meta to crawl content from sites operated by businesses with Meta accounts and use the material to train AI models.

After facing questions, Meta said the clause was deleted. In a statement, the company said it had listened to feedback and clarified that the update was a consolidation of existing advertising terms, not an expansion of crawling practices. The revised terms state that crawled and collected data will be used only for advertising and commercial products, and site owners can still control crawler access through robots.txt.

The company had previously said the update did not reflect a change in how it crawls the web.