NEW YORK (AP) — A federal lawsuit filed Tuesday in Manhattan targets Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, with five major publishers and author Scott Turow claiming the social media giant unlawfully utilized millions of protected literary works to develop its artificial intelligence language model called Llama.
The class action case, brought before a federal court in Manhattan, charges the technology company with violating copyright protections and represents another chapter in the growing legal conflict between the publishing industry and artificial intelligence developers.
According to the legal filing, Zuckerberg and his company operated under their famous philosophy of “move fast and break things” while unlawfully accessing an enormous collection of books and academic publications to build Llama.
“Defendants reproduced and distributed millions of copyrighted works without permission, without providing any compensation to authors or publishers, and with full knowledge that their conduct violated copyright law,” the complaint reads in part. “Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement.”
The five publishing entities bringing the lawsuit — Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan and McGraw Hill — represent notable writers including Turow, James Patterson, Donna Tartt, former President Joe Biden and at least two recent Pulitzer Prize recipients announced Monday, Yiyun Li and Amanda Vaill.
Meta issued a statement Monday declaring its intention to “fight this lawsuit aggressively.”
“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,” the statement reads in part.
During recent years, many writers have initiated legal proceedings related to artificial intelligence. In 2025, Anthropic reached an agreement to pay $1.5 billion to resolve a class action lawsuit brought by thriller author Andrea Bartz and nonfiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson. A final approval hearing is set for next week.
