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Elon Musk's X, formerly known as Twitter, has updated its developer agreement to block third parties from using its user content to train AI models, TechCrunch reports.
Developers shall not attempt to "use the X API or X Content to fine-tune or train a foundation or frontier model," reads the "Reverse Engineering and other Restrictions" section of the updated agreement.
This is a sharp turn from an October update to X's privacy policy, which allowed the platform to share its user data with third-party collaborators "to train their artificial intelligence models, whether generative or otherwise" unless users opted out.
Why did it change now? Musk's xAI company, which owns and develops the Grok chatbot, has acquired X. Naturally, xAI may no longer want others to tap into X's data and gain the same competitive edge it has for Grok and other AI models it may develop. Not for free, at least.
This move could translate into a potential new revenue stream for X, which could license its content to third parties for a fee. Reddit, for instance, has struck similar deals with Google and OpenAI, with the former paying a hefty $60 million fee.
Reddit also has implemented safeguards to block bots and web crawlers from scraping its data. Anthropic allegedly tried to scrape Reddit data without permission and is now being sued for it.
Note that X's policy change is only for third-party developers. The company's terms of service still allow it to use user data to train its own AI models.
You can opt out of it by going to the X.com website, selecting More (or Settings) > Privacy and safety > Grok & Third-party collaborators, and deselecting the option that says, "Allow your public data as well as your interactions, inputs, and results with Grok and xAI to be used for training and fine-tuning."