Meta's paused ad terms and who pays when its AI edits your ad

Meta has put its new business terms on hold. Britain's competition regulator opened an investigation anyway. For marketers, the sharpest part of the fight is a clause about who answers for what Meta's AI does to their ads.

According to Adweek, digital agency Exverus said Meta's AI is tacking on sitelinks, translating copy, and spinning up AI images and carousels out of a brand's own photos, sometimes on ads where advertisers did not switch the feature on. At the same time, Meta's revised commercial terms added an "AI Features" section. PPCPPCPay Per Click (PPC) is a digital advertising model where you pay only when a user clicks your ad, not when it is merely displayed.View full definition → Land reports that in Adweek's reading, it makes advertisers "solely responsible" for whatever Meta's AI creates or changes in their ads, including features that Meta switches on itself. Under the earlier wording, an advertiser was responsible for AI output only when it chose to use Meta's AI creative tools; the new section drops that condition.

Publishers went after a different clause. According to Engadget, the terms let Meta use automated software such as web scrapers and crawlers to access business websites to build its advertising and business products. On October 28, Reuters reported that Meta was indefinitely delaying the rollout of its new commercial terms following concerns from publishers and digital advertisers. Two days later, according to Reuters, Britain's competition regulator opened an investigation into whether Meta was imposing exploitative terms on publishers and advertisers to use their content to develop its own services, including its AI features. Meta said there were "no grounds" for an investigation.

Why it matters: automation is moving creative decisions from the brand to the platform, and the liability was not moving with them. Some agencies have stopped trusting the defaults. PPC Land reports that AdCellerant now turns off Meta's default AI automation on every campaign.

The disputed part: a Meta spokesperson told Adweek that it folds existing generative AI ad terms into the main terms and that advertisers can switch off individual Advantage+ features in Ads Manager. Engadget, for its part, noted that the company hasn't made any substantive changes to its terms since it removed the word "train" and added a reference to "advertising and business products".

What to watch: Meta told Reuters it expects the consultation could extend beyond November 20, in which case it would delay implementation of the updated terms. The CMA's investigation will determine whether Meta holds a dominant position in a relevant UK market and, if so, whether the terms amount to abuse of that position. The publishers' complaint was mostly about crawling. The open question is whether the advertiser liability clause comes back unchanged.