Mark Zuckerberg ‘personally authorised’ Meta’s copyright infringement, publishers allege

Five publishing houses and author Scott Turow sued Meta and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, alleging the company illegally used millions of copyrighted works to train its AI language system, Llama.

The class action lawsuit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, accuses the tech giant of copyright infringement and opens up a new front in the ongoing battle between the book community and developers of AI.

The plaintiffs allege that Zuckerberg and Meta "followed their well-known motto 'move fast and break things'" by illegally drawing upon a massive trove of books and journal articles for Llama.

"Defendants reproduced and distributed millions of copyrighted works without permission, without providing any compensation to authors or publishers, and with full knowledge that their conduct violated copyright law," the complaint reads in part. "Zuckerberg himself personally authorised and actively encouraged the infringement."

The five companies suing are Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan and McGraw Hill. They have published authors including Turow, James Patterson, Donna Tartt, former President Joe Biden and at least two of the Pulitzer Prize winners announced on Monday, Yiyun Li and Amanda Vaill.

In a statement on Monday, Meta vowed to "fight this lawsuit aggressively".

"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 reads in part.

Over the past few years, numerous authors have pursued legal action involving AI. In 2025, Anthropic agreed to pay US$1.5 billion to settle a class action suit initiated by thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and non-fiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson. A final approval hearing is scheduled for next week.

— AP

Caption: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives for a landmark trial on Wednesday, February 18. AP