Court clears Meta in copyright dispute over AI training

A U.S. federal judge has dismissed a copyright lawsuit brought by 13 authors against Meta Platforms, marking a significant development in the ongoing legal scrutiny of how artificial intelligence companies use copyrighted material for training.

The ruling, issued on June 25, 2025, by U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in San Francisco, rejected claims that Meta illegally used the authors’ works to train its generative AI system, LLaMA. The plaintiffs included public figures such as comedian Sarah Silverman and authors Jacqueline Woodson and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Judge Chhabria stated that the authors "made the wrong arguments" and dismissed the case. However, he emphasised that the ruling applies only to the arguments and plaintiffs in this specific case, and does not establish that Meta’s use of copyrighted content is lawful. "This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful," the judge wrote. "It stands only for the proposition that these plaintiffs made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one."

The authors had alleged that Meta pulled their books from online "shadow libraries" and used them without permission for AI training. They argued that Meta "could and should have paid" to license the material instead.

Meta countered that U.S. copyright law permits "the unauthorised copying of a work to transform it into something new" and claimed that outputs from LLaMA are fundamentally different from the original works. Meta also stated that its model cannot be used to reproduce the books in question. "No one can use LLaMA to read Sarah Silverman’s description of her childhood or Junot Diaz’s story of a Dominican boy growing up in New Jersey," the company said in court filings.

The court's ruling noted that there is reason to believe the AI industry’s current training practices could infringe on copyright laws. Judge Chhabria wrote that "in many circumstances it will be illegal to copy copyright-protected works to train generative AI models without permission" and that AI companies "will generally need to pay copyright holders for the right to use their materials."

Chhabria also dismissed the argument that copyright enforcement would slow technological progress, stating that the notion was "ridiculous." He added, "These products are expected to generate billions, even trillions of dollars for the companies that are developing them. If using copyrighted works to train the models is as necessary as the companies say, they will figure out a way to compensate copyright holders for it."

Earlier in the same week, Judge William Alsup ruled in a separate case that AI company Anthropic did not violate copyright law by training its chatbot on millions of books, citing "transformative" use under the fair use doctrine. However, Alsup ordered a trial over whether Anthropic illegally acquired the books from pirated sources.

Judge Chhabria, in his ruling on the Meta case, criticised Alsup’s interpretation, writing that Alsup "focused heavily on the transformative nature of generative AI while brushing aside concerns about the harm it can inflict on the market for the works it gets trained on."

Although Meta secured dismissal in this lawsuit, the court’s decision leaves the door open for future claims, suggesting that similar cases with stronger legal arguments could proceed. The outcome maintains momentum in an evolving legal debate over how generative AI technologies interact with existing copyright law.