A coalition of major publishers-including Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan, and McGraw Hill-has filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms in Manhattan federal court, accusing the tech giant of copyright infringement. The suit claims Meta illegally used millions of copyrighted books, textbooks, scientific articles, and novels to train its artificial intelligence model, Llama.
The publishers, joined by author Scott Turow, filed a proposed class action alleging Meta pirated the works to build its large language models, which are designed to respond to human prompts. Among the cited works are N.K. Jemisin's "The Fifth Season" and Peter Brown's "The Wild Robot."
"Meta's mass-scale infringement isn't public progress," said Maria Pallante, president of the Association of American Publishers. "AI will never be properly realized if tech companies prioritize pirate sites over scholarship and imagination."
Meta has not yet responded to requests for comment. The publishers are seeking permission to represent a larger class of copyright owners and are demanding unspecified monetary damages.
This lawsuit marks the latest escalation in the ongoing legal war between creators and tech companies over AI training data. Similar suits have been filed against OpenAI, Anthropic, and others. The central legal question is whether training AI on copyrighted content constitutes "fair use" by creating transformative new works-a question that has already produced conflicting rulings in federal courts.
In a related development, Anthropic-backed by Amazon and Google-became the first major AI company to settle such a case, agreeing last year to pay authors $1.5 billion to resolve a class-action lawsuit.