Terms of (Ab)Use

An Analysis of GenAI Services

We analyse the terms of generative AI services from the perspective of an EU-based consumer and share our findings that reiterate known issues as well as surface new ones unique to GenAI services. The implications of these practices are severe, as we find consumers suffer from lack of necessary information, significant imbalance of power, and have responsibilities they cannot materially fulfil without violating the terms. We make concrete recommendations for authorities and policymakers to urgently upgrade existing consumer protection mechanisms to tackle this growing issue.

Cite as: Pandit, Harshvardhan J., Blankvoort, Dick A. H., Shaaban, Adel, Luccioni, Sasha, & Birhane, Abeba (2026). Terms of (Ab)Use: An Analysis of GenAI Services (preprint). 9th ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT), Montreal, Canada. Zenodo. DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2603.18964

Our Contributions

  1. We provide a methodological framework for performing a fine-grained annotation and assessment of the consumer terms used by GenAI services;
  2. We manually annotated the terms of use of six GenAI services (see findings) and highlight failures regarding ‘good faith’, lack of transparency, and imbalances as defined in EU consumer protection laws (see analysis);
  3. We provide concrete recommendations for policy makers to both interpret existing consumer protection regulation as well as shape new laws, to ensure better consumer protection and fairness in GenAI services.

Updates

  • 15 March 2026: During our analysis, several GenAI Providers updated their documents (terms, privacy policies), and we are working on analysing them to assess whether our identified issues persist.
  • 24 October 2025: We have contributed this work in a preliminary form as our feedback to the EU's proposed Digital Fairness Act.