Apple has hired Scott Tucker, Meta's longtime deputy general counsel and head of global litigation, to fill a newly created role as vice president of global litigation and financial services, according to Bloomberg. Tucker will oversee worldwide commercial and patent litigation plus legal matters tied to Apple's financial products, with existing litigation executive Heather Grenier now reporting to him. The hire follows general counsel Jennifer Newstead's own move from Meta to Apple earlier this year.
Meta is rolling out new commercial terms of service, effective October 30, that give the company broad rights to collect content from websites linked to business accounts, including for use in training AI systems. The terms don't explicitly mention AI but reference automated crawling and a single use of the word 'train,' and offer no direct opt-out for businesses that accept them. Meta says it has no current plans to override robots.txt protections that let publishers block its crawlers.
Meta has updated the commercial terms for Meta Business Suite to explicitly allow its bots and automated tools to crawl, index, and use content from websites associated with business accounts, including news publishers. The change takes effect October 30 with no opt-out option; businesses must accept the terms or lose access to the platform. Meta describes the update as a consolidation of existing conditions rather than a new policy.
Some Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses users reported their devices recorded and transcribed conversations even though they hadn't activated the AI assistant with the wake phrase, including users who had disabled the 'Respond without Hey Meta' setting. Meta told Android Authority the issue has been resolved and that users can review or delete voice logs through settings, but has not explained what caused the bug or how many devices were affected.
Meta released Muse Spark Open, an open-weights AI model with 42 billion active parameters and a one-million-token context window, built with help from Apple's hardware team to optimize it for the M5 Mac Studio Ultra. The model's weights are now publicly available on HuggingFace under Meta's Muse Model license, though running it on Apple hardware requires two $5,499 M5 Mac Studio Ultras.
Meta is rolling out new commercial terms of service, effective October 30, that require business accounts to allow Meta's bots to crawl and use content from any websites linked to those accounts, not just their social media posts. Businesses cannot opt out of this provision; the only alternative offered is to stop using Meta's services. Nieman Lab reported that the change would affect virtually every news organization with a Meta business account, since nearly all maintain one.
Meta launched an open-weight version of its Muse Spark LLM called Muse Spark Open, allowing users to download and run the model on their own hardware rather than access it only via cloud service. The model has 816 billion parameters and a 1-million-token context window, which Meta says makes it the most capable open-weight model available in the U.S. Apple collaborated with Meta to ensure the model runs efficiently on Mac Studio hardware.
A video clip of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wincing after drinking a Guinness circulated widely online, drawing significant attention and commentary. The moment became a talking point largely because it showed an unscripted, relatable reaction from a billionaire tech executive.
Tesla unveiled a prototype of its long-delayed next-generation Roadster at a livestreamed event in Waco, Texas, nearly ten years after first taking deposits for the car. The two-seat vehicle demonstrated stunts including clinging upside down to a ramp, flipping mid-air and hovering. CEO Elon Musk said production would begin in 2028, gave no price, and said it would be the company's last model designed for a human driver, lacking its automated driving system.
Meta is updating its commercial and self-serve ad terms, effective October 30th, with language authorizing it to deploy web crawlers and bots on domains "associated" with businesses using its advertising platforms, including news publishers. The terms state Meta can use that content to develop, improve, research, and train its AI products. Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts says the move simply consolidates existing ad terms and denies any change to how the company uses web crawlers.
Child protection campaigner Simmons-Read warned that the UK's planned 2027 ban on social media for under-16s 'doesn't go far enough' and could be circumvented by criminals, potentially also deterring young people from reporting grooming. He called for tech platforms to invest more in detecting exploitation as it happens. The government said it is drafting legislation to block children from viewing or sharing nude images on devices, while Meta said it restricts contact between adults and unconnected teens and uses behavioural signals to flag possible grooming.
Meta is updating the commercial terms of use for its Business Suite accounts, effective October 30, to authorize web scraping of websites 'associated with' those accounts, including news organizations' sites. The updated language says Meta can use automated tools to access, index, cache, and collect content, and explicitly states that collected material can be used to train Meta's AI products.
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