SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK — Novelist Scott Turow and publishers Cengage, Elsevier, Hachette, Macmillan and McGraw-Hill filed a class-action lawsuit on May 5, 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against Meta and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg. The suit alleges Meta scraped millions of copyrighted works from across the internet, including from pirate sites, to train its Llama artificial intelligence models without permission.

The complaint alleges Meta removed copyright management information from the works to conceal that it was training its AI on the materials, and that the company obtained copyrighted works from pirate websites such as LibGen and Anna's Archive. Llama is Meta's suite of AI models that generates text outputs in response to user prompts.

The complaint claims Llama reproduces versions of original works from novels, journal articles and textbooks, and in some cases recreates verbatim copies. It also claims Llama mirrors certain authors' personal style in its responses. The filing cites verbatim copying of several paragraphs from a calculus textbook to support its claim that the training is infringement.

Works cited in the lawsuit as allegedly used to train Llama include Turow's Presumed Innocent, Douglas Preston's Impact, Peter Brown's The Wild Robot, N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season, and Lemony Snicket's Who Could That Be at This Hour?

The suit alleges Meta bypassed normal licensing procedures and that Zuckerberg personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement. According to the complaint, Meta briefly considered licensing deals with major publishers after the release of Llama 1 but abandoned that strategy in April 2023 following verbal instructions from Zuckerberg to stop licensing efforts. The lawsuit argues that Meta's conduct falls outside protections afforded by fair-use provisions of the U.S. copyright code, and seeks unspecified monetary damages.

Turow said in a statement, "All Americans should understand that the bold future promised by A.I., has been, to paraphrase the investigative writer Alex Reisner, created with stolen words." Authors Guild Chief Executive Mary Rasenberger said in a statement, "It's the most flagrant copyright breach in history."

A Meta spokesperson said, "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 spokesperson's comment referenced prior court rulings, including a June 2025 decision in which federal Judge Vincent Chhabria ruled that Meta engaged in fair use when it used a dataset of nearly 200,000 books to train Llama, rejecting a copyright claim brought by 13 authors including Sarah Silverman and Junot Díaz.

In a separate case, Anthropic, maker of the AI chatbot Claude, agreed to settle with hundreds of thousands of authors for $1.5 billion.