Source: The Guardian

Five major publishers — Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan and McGraw Hill — together with author Scott Turow filed a proposed class-action complaint in Manhattan federal court on 5 May 2026, alleging that Meta pirated millions of their works and used them without permission to train its Llama large language models to respond to human prompts. The complaint, according to the extracted text, alleges the allegedly copied material ranges from textbooks and scientific articles to novels, and cites examples the plaintiffs say were used, including The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin and The Wild Robot by Peter Brown.

Plaintiffs seek court permission to represent a larger class of copyright owners and demand an unspecified amount of monetary damages. The filing is presented in the context of an ongoing copyright battle in which dozens of authors, news outlets, visual artists and other plaintiffs have sued AI companies including Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic; the extracted material notes that related cases will likely hinge on whether AI training constitutes fair use. The article quotes Maria Pallante of the Association of American Publishers criticizing Meta’s conduct, and records a Meta spokesperson denying wrongdoing and asserting that courts have found some AI training can qualify as fair use, while saying Meta “will fight this lawsuit aggressively.” The text also records prior developments: two judges issued diverging rulings last year, Anthropic settled a class action for $1.5bn, and The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, as stated in the extracted content.