Contracts

Meta has pushed back the start date of its revised Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms from October 30 to November 20, 2026, saying it needs more time to explain the update to partners. The delay came one day after the News/Media Alliance, a nonprofit representing more than 2,000 U.S. publishers, demanded that Meta withdraw the terms. The central dispute is a clause authorizing automated software, including scrapers, bots, and crawlers, to access and collect content from domains and pages linked to a business's products. The language remained in place as of Friday.

Meta's revised Commercial Terms would let the company send automated crawlers to any website linked to a Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp business account. The clause allows Meta to "access, index, cache, analyze, collect, retrieve, or crawl" those domains and pages and to "periodically pull updates" from them. Starting October 30, business accounts that keep using the products will consent to this scraping. No opt-out is available before the effective date, and the only way to refuse is to stop using business products. Meta says the clause mainly consolidates crawling language previously spread across other terms, that its crawling terms apply only to its ads and business products, and that site owners can still control access through robots.txt.

Clio has asked a federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia for a declaration that it has no obligation to renew a case-law data feed it once supplied to Ross Intelligence. Clio argues the arrangement lapsed when Ross stopped paying its $50,000 annual fee in 2020, just before Ross closed its platform. Law360's coverage also names Thomson Reuters, BARBRI, and Themis Solutions. Details of the complaint come from press summaries, not the filing itself. The dispute sits atop a much larger case. Thomson Reuters sued Ross in 2020 for copying Westlaw headnotes after Ross was refused a Westlaw license, and Ross had turned to LegalEase Solutions, which converted Westlaw material into training data. A Delaware judge ruled for Thomson Reuters on infringement but left several factual questions for trial. On September 29, 2026, the Third Circuit affirmed. It held that 2,243 Westlaw headnotes are copyrightable and that Ross's copying of them to train a legal-research AI was not fair use. The court called it the first such decision by a federal appeals court.

Major US banks are moving to keep third-party AI agents out of customer accounts. Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Charles Schwab announced or imposed restrictions within about a week in mid-October 2026. Citi will not let third-party agents log in or transact on its digital platforms, though customers can still grant read-only access through approved open-banking providers. Schwab is blocking unauthorized agents from moving client money, including Meta's Muse. Morgan Stanley has also begun blocking agents as a precaution. Wells Fargo has taken a different approach. It has not said it blocks agents, but its Online Access Agreement, effective November 24, 2026, treats agent-initiated transactions as authorized by the customer and places agent use at the customer's own risk. The core concern is credential sharing and screen scraping, in which software logs in as the customer and the bank cannot tell whether a human approved each step. Axios reported on October 22 that autonomous agents were using customer credentials to log into accounts and sometimes acted beyond their instructions. Canadian banks RBC, TD, CIBC and Scotiabank confirmed similar limits to CBC News in early November.