7 Contract Clauses That Quietly Give Away Your AI Rights

Quick answer: Most rights aren't given away through one obvious bad clause, they're given away through several small, vague ones stacked together: broad "improvement" language, old future-proofing boilerplate, bundled biometric consent, and silence on AI specifically.

Most rights get given away not through one obvious bad clause, but through several small, vague ones stacked together. Here are seven worth reading twice.

1. "For the improvement of company products." The most common AI rights-grant language in circulation right now. Broad enough to cover training data use, specific enough to hold up legally. This is usually the single highest-leverage clause to negotiate, because it tends to be the broadest and the least scrutinized.
2. "All media now known or hereafter devised." Older boilerplate, originally meant to future-proof contracts against new technology. Now being read as covering AI uses no one anticipated when it was written.
3. Open-ended approval clauses. Language requiring your approval for new uses, paired with a line saying approval "cannot be unreasonably withheld." What counts as unreasonable is rarely defined, which effectively hands the interpretation to whichever party has more resources to defend it in a dispute.
4. Biometric consent bundled into general terms. Facial or voice data collection folded into a broad terms-of-service agreement instead of disclosed as its own specific, separate consent.
5. Indefinite duration clauses. Rights grants with no expiration date, meaning the rights persist even after the business relationship ends. This is especially risky in long-running talent or record deals, where the original signer may no longer be actively reviewing how the rights are used decades later.
6. Vague "purpose" language. Consent given for a broadly defined purpose rather than a specific one, the difference between "we may use your data" and "we may use your data for X."
7. Silence on AI training specifically. Many contracts simply don't mention AI at all, which doesn't mean AI use isn't covered. Absence of a carve-out often means the broader rights-grant language applies by default.

Why these clauses cluster together

None of these seven clauses is unusual on its own, and that's exactly the design problem. A contract with two or three of them stacked together, an open-ended purpose, no expiration, and silence on AI, can end up granting far more than the person signing it ever intended, without a single individual clause looking obviously alarming.

FAQ

What's the single most important clause to check in any contract? The rights grant section. It defines what you're actually authorizing a company to do with your content, data, or likeness.

Is old contract language automatically safe from AI use? No. Deliberately broad "future-proofed" language, like "all media now known or hereafter devised," is increasingly being applied to AI uses specifically.

How do I know if a contract covers AI training? Look for broad "improvement of products" or "development" language, and check whether there's a specific AI carve-out or exclusion. Most contracts don't have one.