Meta’s revised business terms may still allow AI scraping, lawyers warn

The first version said Meta could use any content from a business account’s linked websites to develop, research and train its products. Experts told Nieman Lab this might let Meta argue that its contract outranks robots.txt, the file sites use to tell crawlers what they may access. Cornell law professor James Grimmelmann says the change leaves the broad language about sites “associated with your products or services” untouched. Media lawyer Matt Topic of Loevy & Loevy argues that “develop” is wide enough to cover training. Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts says site owners can still use robots.txt and that the update is not about scraping news sites.

Why it matters

The dispute is less about one clause than about which rule wins: a site’s robots.txt file or a platform’s contract. If commercial terms can quietly override crawler blocks, publishers lose one of the few tools they have to control AI training. Until Meta defines what a “business product” is, the question stays open, and other platforms may watch how far such wording can stretch.