The Authors Guild applauds the publishers and the other named plaintiffs for bringing this case, which represents another important step in the fight to hold AI companies accountable for the mass-scale theft of authors’ works.  

We are especially grateful to Scott Turow, a past Guild President and current Vice President of the Authors Guild Foundation Board, for serving as a class representative on behalf of authors. As detailed in the complaint, Meta copied hundreds of thousands of books from websites that it knew were illegal pirate sites used to train its Llama language model. This is another example of one of the world’s wealthiest companies free-riding on the hard work and talents of working writers to generate billions of dollars, not a penny of which has gone to the people whose work makes the technology possible.  

“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,” said Turow. “It is all the more shameful that these violations of the law were undertaken by one of the richest corporations in the world.”

The proposed class mirrors those in the Anthropic and OpenAI cases: if your books were downloaded by Meta from any of the pirate sites, you may be included— details to come as the case unfolds. 

The Authors Guild has been immersed in this fight for years, and we stand ready to assist the plaintiffs in this case in any way we can.