The class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, accuses the tech giant of copyright infringement and opens a new front in the ongoing battle between the book community and developers of AI.
The plaintiffs allege that Zuckerberg and Meta “followed their famous motto ‘move fast and break things'” by illegally using a vast trove of books and journal articles for Llama.
The complaint states in part, “Defendants reproduced and distributed millions of copyrighted works without permission, without paying any compensation to authors or publishers, and with full knowledge that their conduct violated copyright law.” “Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the breach.”
Authors published by the five companies suing – Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan and McGraw Hill – include Turo, james pattersonDonna Tartt, ex President Joe Biden and at least two Pulitzer Prize Winner Yiyun Li and Amanda Weil made the announcement on Monday.
In a statement on Monday, Meta vowed to “aggressively fight this lawsuit.”
“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 said.
Over the past few years, several authors have taken legal action related to AI. In 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion To settle a class action suit started by thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and nonfiction writers Charles Graber and Kirk Wallace Johnson. A final approval hearing is scheduled for next week.
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