Publishers Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan, and McGraw Hill on Tuesday sued Meta Platforms in Manhattan federal court, alleging the tech giant misused their books and journal articles to train its artificial intelligence model, Llama.
The publishers, along with author Scott Turow, alleged in a proposed class‑action complaint that Meta pirated millions of copyrighted works and used them without permission to train its large language models to respond to human prompts.
“AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity, and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement on Tuesday.
“We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”
The publishers alleged that Meta pirated works ranging from textbooks and scientific articles to novels, including The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin and The Wild Robot by Peter Brown, for AI training.
They asked the court for permission to represent a larger class of copyright owners and sought an unspecified amount of monetary damages.
“Meta’s mass‑scale infringement isn’t public progress, and AI will never be properly realized if tech companies prioritize pirate sites over scholarship and imagination,” Maria Pallante, president of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement.
The lawsuit opens a new front in the ongoing copyright battle between creators and technology companies over AI training. Dozens of authors, news outlets, visual artists, and other plaintiffs have sued companies including Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic, alleging copyright infringement.
Many of the pending cases are expected to hinge on whether AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material by using it to create new, transformative content. The first two judges to consider the issue issued diverging rulings last year.
Amazon‑ and Google‑backed Anthropic was the first major AI company to settle one of these cases, agreeing last year to pay a group of authors $1.5 billion to resolve a class‑action lawsuit that could have exposed the company to billions more in damages for alleged piracy.