Oct 22, 2026
A federal magistrate judge ordered Meta to disclose the names of executives who approved downloading pirated books via BitTorrent from shadow libraries like LibGen to train its AI models, rejecting the company's attempts to blame rank-and-file staff. The order comes amid an ongoing copyright lawsuit over Meta's use of pirated content for AI training.
Nearly 300 authors filed copyright infringement claims against Meta Platforms in California federal court, alleging the company trained its AI models on pirated copies of their books. The authors are seeking jury trials and maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per infringement, rejecting class action settlements.
The FBI, NSA, and CISA issued a joint alert accusing major Chinese AI companies including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and Alibaba of conducting industrial-scale campaigns to extract proprietary knowledge from American AI models through a technique called distillation.