What "For the Improvement of Company Products" Actually Authorizes

Quick answer: This phrase is a rights-grant clause. It's broad enough to cover AI training and specific enough to hold up legally, meaning it can already authorize a company to use your content, voice, or image as AI training input, with no separate AI clause required.

If you've signed a contract, app permission, or terms-of-service agreement in the last few years, there's a good chance you agreed to some version of "for the improvement of company products." It reads like boilerplate. It isn't.

What the clause is actually doing

This exact language shows up across creator and music deals, and the rights-grant section of any contract is the section that matters most, more than payment terms, more than approval rights. This clause is a rights grant: the part of an agreement where you authorize a company to use something of yours, content, data, likeness, for a defined purpose. "Improvement of company products" is broad enough to cover AI training and precise enough to survive legal challenge, which is exactly why it's everywhere.

In plain terms: if a company's idea of "product improvement" now includes building or training AI systems, this clause alone can already authorize using your content, voice, or image as training data. No update to the contract, no additional signature, no new notice is required, because the original language was written broadly enough to absorb whatever "improvement" comes to mean later.

Why it's showing up in everything at once

This rights-grant language predates generative AI by years, it originally covered things like using customer feedback to improve app features. What changed isn't the clause; it's the scope of what "improvement" now means. The wording didn't need to be rewritten to cover AI training. AI training just needed to become something companies do.

That's also why decade-old boilerplate like "all media now known or hereafter devised" is suddenly relevant again: language written to future-proof a contract is now being read as covering technology that didn't exist when it was signed. Companies aren't necessarily acting in bad faith when they read old contracts this way. In many cases, the language was deliberately drafted to be elastic, and elastic language stretches exactly as far as new technology takes it.

What to look for in your own contracts

• Any clause referencing "improvement," "development," or "enhancement" of products or services
• Whether the rights grant is limited to a specific use, or left open-ended
• Whether there's a carve-out excluding AI training specifically (rare, but increasingly requested)
• Whether the clause expires, or persists indefinitely, even after the relationship ends
• Whether the grant is exclusive or non-exclusive, and whether you retain the right to license the same content or likeness elsewhere

What creators and talent are starting to negotiate

Some creators and talent are now pushing to have AI training explicitly excluded from rights-grant language, or to require a separate, specific consent for it. It's still uncommon, but it's the direction more sophisticated contracts are heading: separating "you may use my content for the service" from "you may use my content to train a model." The more leverage a creator has, the more likely they are to get this carve-out in writing rather than relying on goodwill.

FAQ

What is a rights grant clause? The section of a contract where you authorize a company to use your content, data, or likeness for a stated purpose. The scope of that purpose determines how much you're actually giving away.

Does "improvement of company products" cover AI training? It can. The phrase is broad enough that many companies read it as covering AI development, even without a separate clause naming AI specifically.

Can I negotiate this clause out of a contract? Yes. Increasingly, creators and talent are requesting AI training be explicitly excluded or covered by a separate, specific consent rather than bundled into general product-improvement language.