The WeTransfer service, used by creatives to transfer their work, is the latest to want to use your work to train AI models. More here.
Update: WeTransfer has since come back to Film Stories with a reply – and an amendment to its terms of service. You can find the full story in a separate post.
Our previous story follows…
One of the most popular services for sending large files around the world, and as such used by a lot of independent filmmakers, is WeTransfer. If you’ve not used it before, the service allows you to transfer large files to another party by uploading them to the WeTransfer’s servers; the recipient is then emailed a link to download them.
It’s a good service, with the premium version offering greater capacity. The free version is pretty generous too, and understandably for creative collaboration, it’s become really rather useful.
WeTransfer has announced a change in its Terms & Conditions at WeTransfer, however, which formally comes into effect in August. There’s a paragraph under the heading of ‘Content’, clause 6.3, that might generate some concern among its users.
The paragraph reads:
You hereby grant us a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable license to use your Content for the purposes of operating, developing, commercializing, and improving the Service or new technologies or services, including to improve performance of machine learning models that enhance our content moderation process, in accordance with the Privacy & Cookie Policy. Such license includes the right to reproduce, distribute, modify, prepare derivative works based upon, broadcast, communicate to the public, publicly display, and perform Content. You will not be entitled to compensation for any use of Content by us under these Terms.
(The bold highlights are ours.)
You don’t need to do much reading between the lines to conclude that if you send around your creative work using WeTransfer, the company will now have the right to use it to train AI models. Furthermore, say you’d uploaded some artwork and used WeTransfer to send it to someone else, it can now stick it into an AI platform, and if people then produce ‘derivative works’ based on it, you don’t have a leg to stand on.
In 2023, WeTransfer boss Alexandar Vassilev shared his views on AI with The Recursive.
“I believe AI will continue to break down barriers,” he said. “It will simplify the process of creating, distributing, and editing content, tasks that currently require a lot of time, skill, and expertise. AI will make these tasks more accessible for creatives everywhere… As a company, we’re developing tools and capabilities to facilitate this process. We’re doing it the ‘WeTransfer way’ – aiming to minimize barriers and friction for our users.”
The full T&Cs can be found here. They are effective as of 8th August 2025. We’ve contacted WeTransfer for comment and will update you should we receive a reply. Update: WeTransfer’s response can be found in a separate post.
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