By Guardian staff reporter
Publication Date: 2026-05-05 17:05:00
Five major publishers sued Meta Platforms in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, saying the tech giant misused their books and magazine 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 lawsuit that Meta pirated millions of their works and used them without permission to train its large Llama language models to respond to human prompts.
“Meta’s large-scale infringements are not public progress, and AI will never be properly implemented when tech companies prioritize pirate sites over science and imagination,” Maria Pallante, president of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement.
Meta has denied any wrongdoing.
“AI drives transformative innovation, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can be considered fair use,” said a meta…
