WeTransfer Tries to Quietly Claim the Rights to our Souls, Immediately Gets Caught by Creatives.

AI rights grab? Maybe. Just a “content moderation update,” they swear....

In a twist none of us asked for, WeTransfer recently updated its Terms of Service and accidentally triggered a creative community-wide panic attack.

On July 14, some sharp eyed users noticed that their fine print now included a casual little clause (Section 6.3, for the legal nerds) granting the company a “perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable license” to... well, do pretty much whatever it wants with our files.

Sounds like something from the Adobe playbook!

You know—just a typical clause that lets them reproduce, modify, broadcast, publicly display, and even create derivative works from our uploads. For free. Forever. With no need to notify us or split the royalties. Totally chill, right?

Oh, and it also included a nod to using our uploads to “improve machine learning models.” Because nothing says we love your art like feeding it to the algorithm gods.

Naturally, this went down about as well as getting design feedback from ‘a friend who once did a Photoshop course'.

Cue panic from fellow designers, artists, galleries, and institutions who—silly us—thought uploading our brand toolkits didn’t mean signing away our intellectual property to an AI startup in disguise.

To calm the storm, WeTransfer scrambled to clarify.

“We don’t use machine learning or any form of AI to process content shared via WeTransfer,”

According to them, the terms were only updated to “enhance content moderation”—you know, to stop the spread of illegal or harmful content.

To their credit, they've since attempted to walk it all back, insisting our files are safe from their non-existent AI overlords. But it’s hard to unsee the phrase “perpetual, royalty-free license” once you’ve read it on a platform known for transferring 3GB of TIFFs with suspiciously soothing music.

So is it a win for us creatives? Maybe. WeTransfer backed down—this time. But the whole kerfuffle is a reminder that even the most artist-friendly platforms can go full Bond villain if you don’t keep an eye on the small print.

In the meantime, feel free to keep sending files. Just... maybe not your life's work. Or your secret album. Or your next big idea. Or anything you wouldn't want to see reimagined by a generative AI and turned into a tote bag.