Meta
Mark Zuckerberg has been accused of breaching copyright laws at Meta to “win” an AI arms race.
Meta has invested heavily in artificial intelligence, but those efforts are now at the center of a new legal battle.
Both Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg are being sued by five publishers and one author, who believe the company illegally copied millions of books and articles to train internal AI systems.
The suit was filed on May 5, 2026, in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Presumed Innocent author making the case against Meta
Elsevier v Meta
The five publishers bringing the case are Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw-Hill, Elsevier, and Cengage, while the writer is Presumed Innocent author Scott Turow.
This is what the plaintiffs are saying in the lawsuit, which can be found here: “In their effort to win the AI ‘arms race’ and build a functional generative AI model, Defendants Meta and Zuckerberg followed their well-known motto: ‘move fast and break things.’
“They first illegally torrented millions of copyrighted books and journal articles from notorious pirate sites and downloaded unauthorized web scrapes of virtually the entire internet.
“They then copied those stolen fruits many times over to train Meta’s multibillion-dollar generative AI system called Llama. In doing so, Defendants engaged in one of the most massive infringements of copyrighted materials in history.”
Mark Zuckerberg is at the center of allegations
Meta
The proposed class action suit seeks unspecified financial damages for the allegations, while Zuckerberg is at the center of the suit, which claims:
“Meta – at Zuckerberg’s direction – copied millions of books, journal articles, and other written works without authorization, including those owned or controlled by Plaintiffs and the Class, and then made additional copies of those works to train Llama.”
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The document adds: “Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement.”
In response (and as per Variety), a Meta spokesperson said: “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. We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.”
For more on the AI debate, check out controversies concerning AI creation Tilly Norwood, movies Megalopolis, Late Night With the Devil, and Thunderbolts, and TV shows True Detective and the One Piece anime.
