Meta has revised its business terms for account holders following concerns that the company was claiming broad rights to use content from news websites to train its artificial intelligence models. The initial terms, which were set to take effect recently, included language that appeared to grant Meta permission to scrape and utilize data from these sites for its AI products.

While the company has since removed the specific phrasing that triggered the backlash, legal scholars remain skeptical of the update's effectiveness. James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell Law School, stated that the changes are insufficient to prevent the practice. According to Grimmelmann, the updated terms still contain language regarding content "associated with your products or services." He argues that this clause remains broad enough to provide Meta with the legal cover necessary to scrape entire websites for AI training purposes without explicit consent from the publishers.

Meta has not provided a detailed public response to these specific legal interpretations, and the company’s current stance on the scope of its scraping capabilities remains a point of contention among industry observers. The situation highlights the ongoing tension between major technology companies developing AI and the news organizations whose content is frequently used to train these systems.