Question to the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade, what discussions his Department has had with Meta regarding (a) businesses' ability to prevent their website content being collected through automated crawling and (b) the potential use of that content to develop or train artificial intelligence products.

Neither Ministers or officials have had any meetings with Meta specifically regarding its revised Commercial Terms and the use of content to train artificial intelligence products.

Responsibility for investigating competition issues falls to Competition and Markets Authority, the UK’s principal competition authority. On 30 October the Competition and Markets Authority opened an investigation into Meta's commercial terms using its Competition Act 1998 (CA98) powers.