Meta plans to revise its commercial terms of service effective October 30 2026, obliging all business accounts to grant the company permission to employ automated scraping tools—such as web crawlers, bots, spiders, and user agents—to access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, and periodically update the domains, web pages, and URLs linked to their products or services, as well as any content made available through users’ interaction with Meta’s platforms. The updated language authorizes Meta (or any entity acting on its behalf) to use the harvested material to develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of its products, services, and features. Although the clause does not explicitly mention artificial intelligence, legal experts infer that the broad “train” permission, combined with unrestricted crawling, would allow Meta to use news publishers’ articles and other proprietary content for AI model training without seeking separate licenses. News organizations, which currently could demand millions of dollars in licensing fees for such access, would lose the ability to opt out; the only recourse offered by Meta is to cease using its services altogether. This sweeping TOS change therefore threatens to shift substantial potential revenue from publishers to Meta by granting it unilateral rights to harvest and utilize external web content for AI development.