Meta Rewrites Web-Crawling Clause to Remove Broad News-Site Scraping Language

Meta has quietly revised its pending commercial terms to remove language that critics argued could have permitted it to scrape news publisher websites at scale for AI training data. The rewrite narrows the scope of what Meta's crawlers are authorized to collect under its commercial agreements, a move that comes amid growing publisher pushback against AI companies harvesting content without licensing deals. For developers and platform builders, this signals that the legal and contractual landscape around AI training data sourcing is actively tightening, with major labs increasingly forced to clarify or constrain their data acquisition practices. Publishers and data providers watching these terms will see this as a meaningful concession, while developers building data pipelines should note that the norms around permissible crawling are shifting. The change reflects broader regulatory and reputational pressure on how frontier AI labs justify and document their training data provenance.