Meta sued for allegedly using copyrighted work to train AI 

Yesterday, a major legal battle put AI right in the center of a debate that goes far beyond technology — it really goes to the heart of creativity, ownership, and what it means to be an author in 2026.  

Five major publishers, along with bestselling novelist Scott Turow, have filed a class-action lawsuit against Meta and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. The accusation is serious: that Meta used millions of copyrighted books and journal articles to train its AI model, Llama, without permission, and in some cases allegedly pulled from pirated sites like LibGen and Sci-Hub.  

The complaint even claims Zuckerberg himself “personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement.”  

Meta has not yet publicly responded to these allegations, but the implications here are already reverberating across the publishing world.  

At the center of this case is a question I keep coming back to: what happens when the work of writers, the people who spend years building stories, ideas and entire worlds, is used to teach machines how to recreate them in seconds?  

Turow didn’t hold back in his response, calling it “shameless, damaging and unjust behavior,” saying he finds it “distressing and infuriating” that one of the richest corporations in the world would allegedly use pirated versions of his work to build a system that can then produce “competing........

© The Hill