Meta delays its new ad and AI terms to 20 November.
Meta has pushed back the start of its revised Commercial Terms and Self-Serve Ad Terms from 30 October to 20 November 2026. The company says it needs more time to explain the changes to partners.
A Meta spokesperson gave Reuters the new date on Friday 23 October, saying the extra weeks would let Meta explain "what's changing and what's not". Meta did not say it would rewrite anything. Publishers and advertisers had complained to EU and UK competition authorities that the contract hands Meta broad rights to use their content for AI, a reading Meta rejects. The European Commission welcomed the delay. The European Publishers Council wants the terms suspended while regulators look at them, and Theo Bamber, chief executive of the UK's News Media Association, called it a pause rather than a fix and asked the CMA to seek public commitments from Meta.
Some wording has already moved. The sentence that let Meta use content from advertisers' websites to train AI was removed after The Verge reported on it on 17 October, and the crawling clause now ties its purpose to Meta's advertising and business products. It still lets Meta send crawlers to any site linked to a business's products, and the text makes no robots.txt commitment, although Meta told Reuters that site owners can still use robots.txt. A new AI Features section makes advertisers solely responsible for what Meta's AI tools produce. Adweek reported on 22 October that Bookshop.org found an AI-generated illustration added to one of its ads after an account update opted it in, and that the agency Exverus pulled live ads to strip AI changes.
What isn't clear is whether Meta will amend the text before 20 November, whether regulators will act first, and who carries the risk for AI features an advertiser never switched on. Hours after the Reuters report, Meta's UK English preview still showed 30 October.
For advertisers in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, the extra weeks are a chance to check which Advantage+ creative enhancements are switched on in each account and to review robots.txt on the sites their ads link to. Under these terms the liability sits with the brand, not Meta.
Why it matters
Advertisers get four more weeks, but Meta hasn't promised to change terms that make them responsible for whatever its AI does to their ads.
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