French publishers sue Meta for training AI on their content

French publishers and authors have filed a lawsuit against Meta✴, accusing the company of copyright infringement by using their books without permission to train generative AI models.

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The lawsuit was filed by trade association SNE, which represents major French publishers including Hachette and Editis, authors’ association SGDL and writers’ union SNAC. The plaintiffs have collected evidence of “massive” copyright infringements and have previously approached Meta✴, to no avail, said SNE President Vincent Montagne. They also notified the European Commission of the incident, claiming that Meta✴’s actions violated European law on AI. Meta✴ did not comment on the incident.

Generative AI models, including those from Meta✴ and OpenAI, are trained on very large amounts of text data, including books and articles. This has led to a wave of lawsuits around the world, with publishers arguing that using their content to train AI is tantamount to theft. AI developers, for their part, are reluctant to disclose the sources of their training data, but say they use it voluntarily in accordance with U.S. copyright laws.

In December, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing the two companies of illegally training AI on the publication’s content. In April 2024, a group of authors filed a similar lawsuit against Anthropic. In January 2025, Indian publishers filed another lawsuit against OpenAI.