Meta has removed a section from its commercial terms of use that legal experts said could be read as broad permission to scrape any website associated with a business account and use that content to train AI models.

The deleted wording declared that Meta could use content from a business account’s domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of its products and services. Nieman Lab spoke with legal experts who called this a ‘remarkable provision,’ since it appeared to grant Meta rights to publisher content simply because the publisher had a Meta business account. The article notes that while Meta won a high-profile copyright lawsuit last year, other AI copyright cases, including ones involving Meta, are still ongoing.

Meta initially downplayed the change, with a spokesperson saying the updated terms did not reflect any difference in how the company crawls the web. The Verge then reported that the language had been removed. In a follow-up statement, Meta said: “We’ve heard you and want to clarify: the crawling terms we consolidated only applied to our ads and business products, and we’ve clarified that in the terms themselves. It does not change how Meta uses web crawlers.”