Earlier this week, Dutch file-sharing platform WeTransfer found itself in the crosshairs of an increasingly familiar story: AI ambition colliding with user trust.

A subtle but potent tweak to its ‘terms of service’ – a clause suggesting user files might be used to “improve performance of machine learning models” -triggered feelings of unease through its global user base, particularly among the creatives it’s long catered to.

Artists, writers, filmmakers and journalists took to X to voice concerns. Was their intellectual property about to become grist for an AI mill? Or would their work be used, without credit or compensation, to help build systems that might one day compete with them?

WeTransfer acted quickly, and by Tuesday, it had revised the clause, removed references to machine learning entirely, and issued a clarifying statement.

“We don’t use customer content to train AI, we never have, and we don’t sell or share user data”, it wrote.

The company explained that the original language was meant to allow for possible future content moderation tools, but conceded the wording had been “unclear”.

The episode, though, is less about WeTransfer itself than what it represents, which is a growing trust deficit between users and tech providers in the age of artificial intelligence.

Ultimately, this is a data issue, with concerns around whose it is, who controls it, and what can legally be done with it.

WeTransfer: the clause that sparked concerns

The specific phrasing at issue was: “You hereby grant us a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable license… including to improve performance of machine learning models”.

To most lawyers, it reads like standard risk-management language. Yet, to most creatives, it reads more like a dystopian data grab. And therein lies the gap between legal logic and public interpretation, between commercial possibility and communicative responsibility.

WeTransfer insists nothing changed in practice, only on paper. “There’s no change in how WeTransfer handles your content in practice,” said a spokesperson.

But the distinction between ‘what we’re doing’ and ‘what we could do’ isn’t always anm obvious one, especially when the clause suggests rights that far exceed the technical needs of a file transfer service.

A broader pattern emerges

WeTransfer’s misstep is not isolated. Zoom, Adobe, Slack, Dropbox – each has been forced to clarify, retract or explain clauses in their service terms that users took to imply their data might be used for AI training.

In every case, legal language intended to secure operational flexibility has been interpreted as an overreach.

Dropbox’s drama involved a toggle switch buried in settings suggesting users could opt into “third-party AI services.”

Meanwhile, Zoom came under fire for language that appeared to give it permission to use video, audio and chat data to develop its AI – until it added the line: “Zoom will not use customer content to train AI models without consent.”

Adobe, for its part, was hit hardest, with its community of illustrators and designers calling foul over AI language they felt granted the company unfettered access to their creations.

Adobe executives scrambled to reassure them that Firefly, its generative model, was only trained on Adobe Stock and public domain content.