Feb 28, 2023Confirmed
Meta and OpenAI Accused of Using LibGen’s Pirated Books to Train AI Models
Rogue: Caused harmAI loose in the worldData exfiltrationDERIVED
Approved by person, Oct 11, 2026. How entries are approved
Court records reveal that Meta employees allegedly discussed pirating books to train LLaMA 3, citing cost and speed concerns with licensing. Internal messages suggest Meta accessed LibGen, a repository of over 7.5 million pirated books, with apparent approval from Mark Zuckerberg. Employees allegedly took steps to obscure the dataset’s origins. OpenAI has also been implicated in using LibGen.
What this means for youAt home, this shows that AI companies may have trained their chatbots on pirated books, which matters if you are an author or publisher. At work, companies using these tools may face questions about where the models' training data came from. In government, it is a legal question about copyright and how AI firms must obtain data.
Sources
- AI Incident Databasehttps://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/997
Data from the AI Incident Database (incidentdatabase.ai), licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. IAAI-21.
Source data license: CC BY-SA 4.0 (database). Report contents keep their own rights; reports.text, submissions, images and videos are excluded from the data license.
rogue:R4
Covered by snapshot 45
da93f03b406f409940d0a6ef47b526607f82ebf457d98f69299b88aceede576a
This entry is record number 2009. It has not been edited since it was approved; the hash above would not match if it had. How to verify