Meta's AI ambitions are facing a major new legal test after five publishing houses and author Scott Turow accused the company of using millions of copyrighted works to train Llama, the company's AI language system.
Worse still, as Fortune noted, the plaintiffs allege it was done under CEO Mark Zuckerberg's direct approval.
The class-action lawsuit, filed May 5 in federal court in Manhattan, alleges copyright infringement and adds new pressure to the widening clash between publishers, authors, and AI developers.
At the center of the dispute is a question that could help define the future of generative AI: When does training an AI model cross the line into unlawful copying?
Publishing giants Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, and Turow are named as plaintiffs in the case. According to the complaint, Meta and Zuckerberg used a large collection of books and journal articles in developing Llama without permission from the people and companies that own those works.
The plaintiffs stated that defendants Meta and Zuckerberg "followed their well-known motto: 'move fast and break things,'" arguing that this was not a gray-area misstep but a deliberate choice to use copyrighted material.
The publishers' catalogs include books by major names, including James Patterson, Donna Tartt, former President Joe Biden, and recent Pulitzer Prize winners Yiyun Li and Amanda Vaill, as Fortune reported. That makes the lawsuit more than a dispute over a small number of titles; it points to how widely AI training practices could reshape the publishing industry.
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As the complaint states, "Defendants reproduced and distributed millions of copyrighted works without permission, without providing any compensation to authors or publishers." It also alleges that "Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement."
Meta, for its part, is not signaling a retreat. In a statement, the company said it would "fight this lawsuit aggressively," arguing that courts have "rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use."
The case also arrives as authors continue to press legal challenges against AI firms, including a major 2025 settlement involving Anthropic. Publishing giant Penguin Random House also filed a lawsuit against OpenAI over copyright claims of its children's book characters. Even Encyclopedia Britannica has jumped in on the action, accusing OpenAI of "cannibalizing" its content to train AI.
For consumers, the outcome could affect how future AI tools are trained and how transparent companies must be about the data behind them. If developers are ultimately required to license training material, that could create new costs for AI companies — but it could also mean compensation and stronger protections for authors and publishers.
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