Ars Technica · October 21, 2026 · On the brief until November 4, 2026

Meta drops the word "train" from its commercial TOS after AI backlash

Intellectual Property LawCorporate Law

THE AI ANGLE

Training commercial models on scraped website content

Meta removed the word "train" from its updated commercial terms of service following criticism from publishers and legal experts. The revised terms still allow the company to scrape linked websites to develop advertising and business products without an explicit commitment to honor robots.txt files. For corporate and intellectual property professionals, the change shows how broad platform agreements can bypass formal content licensing negotiations.

Summary written by AI Business Lens with an AI model from the article at arstechnica.com. It is not the article, and the publisher has not reviewed it. For publishers.

THE TEACHING ANGLE

The central legal question is whether contractual permission to develop business products effectively grants an enforceable license to use scraped web data for model training.

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Meta drops the word "train" from its commercial TOS after AI backlash

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