Five of the world's largest publishing houses and prominent author Scott Turow have filed a federal lawsuit against Meta Platforms and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, alleging that the tech giant illegally used millions of copyrighted books, textbooks, and journal articles to train its artificial intelligence system Llama. The class action complaint, filed on Tuesday in a Manhattan federal court, accuses Meta of pirating works on a massive scale — ranging from scientific publications and academic textbooks to novels such as N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season and Peter Brown's The Wild Robot — without permission or compensation.

The plaintiffs — Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan, and McGraw Hill — allege that Zuckerberg personally authorised the infringement. They are seeking an unspecified amount in monetary damages and asking the court to allow them to represent a broader class of copyright owners, potentially encompassing a vast range of creators whose works may have been used in similar ways.

Meta rejected the accusations and struck a defiant tone.