Publishers and Author File Lawsuit Against Meta Over AI Training Materials

Five major publishers—Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan, and McGraw Hill—along with author Scott Turow, filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Meta Platforms and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in Manhattan federal court on May 5, 2026. The complaint alleges that Meta used books and journal articles without authorization to train its Llama large language models.

According to the court filing, plaintiffs claim Meta obtained materials from sources including LibGen, Anna’s Archive, Sci-Hub, and Sci-Mag, as well as the Common Crawl dataset, which contains web-scraped content from across the internet. The complaint states that Meta "copied the materials many times over for Llama training" and that the models can reproduce "verbatim and near-verbatim" portions of copyrighted works, such as text from Cengage’s textbook Calculus: Early Transcendentals, 9th edition, by James Stewart.

It further alleges that Llama outputs can mirror certain authors' styles in responses.

The lawsuit identifies specific works allegedly used, including The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin and The Wild Robot by Peter Brown, along with textbooks and scientific articles. " It notes that Zuckerberg's net worth has exceeded $200 billion, attributing this in part to Meta's AI development.

Plaintiffs seek to represent a class of copyright owners and request unspecified monetary damages. A Meta spokesperson stated: "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 case is part of ongoing legal disputes over AI training practices. The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. No publicly released court rulings have addressed similar claims against Meta as of May 5, 2026.