The BaseHearingUK House of Lords
Meta: AI Development
In an oral question in the House of Lords, Lord Clement-Jones (Liberal Democrat) asked about Meta's new commercial terms letting it crawl UK business websites for AI development. Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath, for the government, said the Competition and Markets Authority is engaging with Meta.
Why it matters
The same thing, for different readers.
What it means for you
Websites and news publishers that rely on Meta's advertising may have to choose between letting Meta's AI systems use their pages and losing the accounts their income depends on.
For lawmakers
UK ministers told the Lords they are leaving action on Meta's terms to the independent competition regulator, with a government review of creator control due in early 2027.
For researchers
The exchange shows that dropping the word "train" from terms of use does not settle what a company may do with crawled content, a point for anyone studying data provenance.
The question it raises
Who may use a person's published work to build AI, and who must give permission, remains unsettled when the rules are a company's own terms of service.
In their own words
Every quotation was found, word for word, in the text we saved from the source. That shows the words are there; it does not make them true, or prove the speaker meant them as quoted.
From the publisher’s own transcript.
“while Meta has delayed these terms, it has not changed a word of them in doing so. It does not use the word “train” any more, but it can still crawl publishers’ websites to “develop and improve” its products.”
“We are committed to ensuring that creators can control the use of their work. In our March Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, we committed to publishing a review of mechanisms for creators to control their works online”
“UK copyright continues to apply to the use of protected works in AI development and training. Where an activity requires permission under copyright law, that permission must be obtained unless an exception applies.”
“perhaps we cannot really blame Meta for exploring the limits of the policy vacuum created by the Government’s continued inaction on AI and copyright.”
The record
- Questions
- Who can demand evidence, delay a release or stop an unsafe deployment? · What happens to work, income and the economy?
- People
- Lord Clement-Jones (Speaks) · Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Speaks, Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip) · Viscount Camrose (Speaks) · Baroness Stowell of Beeston (Speaks) · Lord Brennan of Canton (Speaks) · Lord Nagaraju (Speaks) · Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Speaks) · Lord Berkeley of Knighton (Speaks) · Lord Wallace of Saltaire (Speaks) · Lord Watts (Speaks)
- What we read
- We read the whole source.
- Found by
- The Radar, run of October 28, 2026, via
uk-house-of-lords-hansard(tier 1: the source’s own channel or an official record) - Cite this
- UK House of Lords, “Meta: AI Development”, October 27, 2026. Entry in the Ctrl AI Base, https://ctrlai.com/base/uk-house-of-lords-2026-10-27-meta-ai-crawling