Hachette, Macmillan and others allege that Meta pirated millions of works from textbooks to novels for Llama model

Five major publishers sued Meta Platforms in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, alleging that the tech giant misused their books and journal articles to train its artificial intelligence models.

Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan and McGraw Hill, as well as author Scott Turow, alleged in the proposed class-action complaint that Meta pirated millions of their works and used them without permission to train its Llama large language models to respond to human prompts.

“Meta’s mass-scale infringement isn’t public progress, and AI will never be properly realized if tech companies prioritize pirate sites over scholarship and imagination,” Maria Pallante, the president of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement.

Meta has denied any wrongdoing.