Five major publishers filed a lawsuit against Meta Platforms in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, accusing the tech giant of improperly using their books and academic journals to train its artificial intelligence systems.

Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan, and McGraw Hill, along with author Scott Turow, allege in a proposed class-action suit that Meta unlawfully copied millions of works and used them without permission to train its Llama large language models to generate responses to user prompts.

“Meta’s mass-scale infringement isn’t public progress, and AI will never be properly realized if tech companies prioritize pirate sites over scholarship and imagination,” Maria Pallante, the president of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement.

Meta has denied any wrongdoing.

“AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use,” a Meta spokesperson responded in a statement on Tuesday. “We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.“

The publishers allege that Meta copied a wide range of materials — including textbooks, scientific papers, and novels such as The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin and The Wild Robot by Peter Brown — to train its AI systems.

They are seeking court approval to bring a broader class-action case on behalf of other copyright holders, as well as unspecified financial damages.

The lawsuit adds to an escalating copyright dispute between creators and technology companies over AI training.

Dozens of authors, news organisations, visual artists, and other rights holders have filed suits against firms including Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic, alleging widespread infringement.

At the centre of the legal battles is the question of whether using copyrighted material to train AI models qualifies as “fair use” because the outputs are transformative and generate new content.

Early rulings have been mixed, with two judges reaching differing conclusions in related cases last year.

In one of the most significant developments so far, Amazon- and Google-backed Anthropic agreed last year to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by authors, reportedly paying about $1.5 billion to resolve claims that could have resulted in far larger damages.