Vercel's CEO likes war criminals. Now he wants your code.

September 2025. Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, poses smiling next to Benjamin Netanyahu at a private AI tech meeting in New York. The photo goes viral within hours. Employees resign. Developers cancel their accounts and migrate to competitors. Enterprise contracts get terminated. The backlash is immediate, loud, and widespread. But Rauch never apologized for any of it.

What he said. And what he didn't.

In the days after the uproar, Rauch gave an interview for Bloomberg claiming the backlash hasn't cost Vercel any customers or employees, and he is "sorry for anyone who felt hurt." Not sorry for sharing a smile with a man whom the ICC has issued an arrest warrant for killing thousands of children and attempting to wipe out an entire population. He was just sorry that you felt something about it.

Rauch wrote in his original caption that he was "optimistic for peace, safety, and greatness for Israel and its neighbors" while tens of thousands of Palestinians were dead, hospitals were being bombed, and the UN commission had already characterized the situation as genocide.

There has not been a single moment where Rauch said he should not have done this. No acknowledgment of the ICC arrest warrant. No recognition of what Netanyahu represents to millions of people around the world, including his own users and his own employees. What he did instead was reframe the entire meeting around AI education, free societies, and progress, which is not accountability. It is waiting for it to blow over.

Now he’s coming for your code.

On March 31st, 2026, Vercel is updating their Terms of Service in a way that directly affects every developer still on their platform. From that date, Vercel can use your code and your Vercel agent chats to train AI models and share that data with third-party providers.

Hobby users are opted in by default, with no notification and no question asked. If you opt out before March 31st, your data stays yours. If you miss the deadline, everything they have already captured is fair game for AI training. On top of that, the updated Terms of Service limit your legal options to challenge this later, effectively removing your ability to seek any kind of remedy in court.

Opt out now, before you forget. Go to your Vercel account settings and disable the AI training data opt-in before March 31st, 2026 at 11:59 PM PST.

You can do that by clicking on Settings > General > Data Preferences > Improve models with my data ( /~/settings/general )

But let’s be honest. Why would you stay with Vercel?

The question is not just whether you want Vercel using your code. The question is whether you want to keep paying a company whose CEO met with a man the ICC has issued an arrest warrant for, called it a productive conversation about progress, gave two interviews doubling down on that framing, and has never once said it was wrong.

There are alternatives. And they are ready for you.

Check out migrateoffvercel.org from T4P’s incubator for a practical guide to leaving Vercel and moving to ethical hosting alternatives. They're also running a Discord community to answer all your questions.

Vercel is not irreplaceable, and the past few months have made that very clear. Move off, and take your code with you.

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