PrivacyHigh
Meta and OpenAI Accused of Using LibGen’s Pirated Books to Train AI Models
- Occurred
- Feb 28, 2023
- Published
- Apr 3, 2025
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
Court records reveal that Meta employees allegedly discussed pirating books to train LLaMA 3, citing cost and speed concerns with licensing. Internal messages suggest Meta accessed LibGen, a repository of over 7.5 million pirated books, with apparent approval from Mark Zuckerberg. Employees allegedly took steps to obscure the dataset’s origins. OpenAI has also been implicated in using LibGen.
Developers
- OpenAI
- Meta
Deployers
- OpenAI
- Meta
Harmed parties
- Writers
- publishers
- Journalists
- Authors
- Academic researchers
Tags
- Training data
- Large language model
- Data scraping
- Copyright
- Copyright infringement
- Piracy
- Book piracy
- Intellectual property theft
- Fair use
- Publishing industry
Classification
Category confidence: 90%
Severity confidence: 85%
Rationale: Unauthorized use of pirated copyrighted material for AI training constitutes a significant legal and privacy violation.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8