Authors pen open letter demanding big tech is 'held accountable' after Meta 'trains AI on pirated books'

The open letter comes after a story in the Atlantic under the headline "The Unbelievable Scale of AI's Pirated-Books Problem" was published on March 20th 2025, detailing "a number of shocking allegations about the practices which were adopted by Meta at the time of the development of its AI model, Llama 3".

A searchable database of more than 7.5 million books and 81 million research papers was published by the Atlantic as part of its report. This data set, called Library Genesis, or "LibGen" for short, is full of pirated material, all of which has been used to develop AI systems by tech-giant Meta.