Adobe 2024: "Agree or Lose Your Work"

The pop-up

In early June 2024, Adobe blocked users from opening Photoshop, and therefore their own files, until they accepted updated terms, with no way to decline and keep working. The clause that ignited the firestorm: "We may access your content through both automated and manual methods," including "techniques such as machine learning." A single tweet highlighting it drew over 5 million views. Photographers, designers, and filmmakers under NDA argued the terms forced them to breach client confidentiality.

Adobe published a clarification, then capitulated: on June 10 it committed to rewriting the terms, and by June 18 shipped new ones stating "You own your content" and, as a binding obligation, "We don't train generative AI on customer content." A creative rebellion forced a Big Tech ToS rewrite in twelve days.

Same month, the FTC came knocking

On June 17, 2024 the DOJ, on FTC referral, sued Adobe and two executives over its default "annual paid monthly" plan: an early-termination fee, 50% of remaining payments, buried in fine print and hover-tooltips, plus a cancellation flow built to obstruct. The complaint alleges an Adobe executive described the hidden fee as being "like heroin" for the company. In March 2026, Adobe settled for $150 million, $75M in penalties, $75M in customer remedies, plus an injunction requiring honest disclosure, while admitting nothing.

Why nobody believed the reassurances

Adobe had marketed Firefly as the "ethically trained" AI. Then reporting revealed ~5% of Firefly's training images were themselves AI-generated, including Midjourney outputs uploaded to Adobe Stock. When the company selling "clean data" turns out to have murky data, users stop believing the fine print, which is precisely why the June pop-up read as a threat rather than paperwork.

The real lesson

Since Adobe forced the subscription model in 2013, professionals have described being held hostage: cancel, and you lose access to your own file formats and workflow. That leverage is what made "accept or lose access" coercive rather than contractual. And note the asymmetry in how it ended: viral outrage fixed the words in twelve days, but only regulators touched the money, two years later. When your livelihood runs through rented software, the Terms of Service aren't paperwork. They're power.