Meta, Facebook‘s parent company, faces a class action lawsuit alleging copyright infringement and unfair competition in training its LLaMA AI model, according to court records revealed by vx-underground on X. First reported by Tom’s Hardware, vx-underground’s post on Twitter claims how court documents from February 5th, 2024, in Kadrey v. Meta show Meta (formerly Facebook) illegally Torrented 81.7TB of data from “shadow libraries” such as Anna’s Archive, Z-Library, and LibGen to train Meta artificial intelligence.
The lawsuit claims that internal communications show Meta researchers expressing concerns about using pirated material as early as October 2022, with one senior AI researcher stating, “I don’t think we should use pirated material. I really need to draw a line here.” Another AI researcher says, “using pirated material should be beyond our ethical threshold” … “SciHub, ResearchGate, LibGen are basically like PirateBay or something like that, they are distributing content that is protectec by copyright and they’re infringing it”.
Despite these concerns, documents show Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying in January 2023, “We need to move this stuff forward… we need to find a way to unblock all this.” Three months later, an employee expressed concern about Meta IP addresses being used for downloading pirated content, adding, “torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn’t feel right.” The documents also suggest Meta took steps to conceal its downloading activity.
This isn’t the first such lawsuit. Other AI companies like OpenAI and Nvidia have faced similar accusations regarding data used for training their models. OpenAI was sued by novelists in June 2023, with The New York Times following suit in December. Nvidia also faced a lawsuit for using copyrighted books, and a former employee revealed extensive video scraping for AI training. OpenAI is now investigating whether DeepSeek illegally obtained data from ChatGPT.
The case against Meta is ongoing, and a court decision on direct infringement is pending. Regardless of the initial outcome, appeals are likely, potentially delaying a final judgment for months or years.