Meta logo is seen on smartphone in front of displayed logo of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus in this illustration picture taken October 28, 2021. (Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration)As the AI race continues to unfold at breakneck speed, yet another tech giant has faced backlash over revised terms that appeared to allow for broader AI training, prompting a swift U-turn.Meta on Saturday, October 17, removed a recently inserted provision in its commercial terms of use that included language reportedly suggesting it could scrape content from sites, including news sites, with a Meta business account to train its AI models.The commercial terms page of Meta was updated with the following: “[…] 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.”However, this provision no longer appears on the page, according to the latest report by The Verge. Several legal experts, including from Neiman Lab and James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell, had pointed out last week that the now-deleted provision would have given Meta the right to use content scraped from sites to train its AI products for free and supersede blocking instructions in a site’s robots.txt file.User concerns over privacy and data ownership have intensified in the age of AI, as tech companies are scraping publicly available, copyright-protected data from every nook and corner of the internet to train their AI models.For instance, Elon Musk’s xAI uses public posts on X to train its Grok chatbot while Meta scrapes publicly-shared content from users above 18 for AI training. This is done by both platforms without obtaining user consent first.Story continues below this adLast year, Meta defeated a high-profile lawsuit over alleged copyright infringement but proceedings in similar cases against AI companies, including Meta, continue.Also Read | Worried your data is used to train AI models? Here’s how to opt-out (if you can)In response to the development, a company spokesperson emphasised that the updated terms did not reflect a change in the way Meta crawls the web.“We’ve heard you and want to clarify: the crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we’ve clarified that in the terms themselves. It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers. As always, content owners can use robots.txt to signal their preferences. This is not about scraping news sites, and these updates don’t give us new rights that supersede those preferences,” the spokesperson was quoted as saying.“There is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false,” Andy Stone, Meta’s vice president of communications, said.Story continues below this adThis is not the first time that tech companies have quietly sought to update their privacy policies and terms of service so that they may use customer data to train their AI models or licence it out to other companies for the same purpose.In July 2025, file sharing service WeTransfer announced it has tweaked its terms to remove any mention of machine learning and AI.The clarification came after public backlash was sparked by a recent update to WeTransfer’s service terms, where the company had suggested that files uploaded by users could be used to “improve machine learning models.” The clause in the original version had said that WeTransfer only had a right to “reproduce, modify, distribute and publicly display” content.