A federal court’s decision in favor of Meta marks a pivotal moment in the intersection of AI development and copyright law, yet leaves the broader legal landscape unresolved.
At a Glance
- A U.S. federal judge has dismissed a copyright lawsuit brought by authors, including Sarah Silverman, against Meta over the training of its Llama AI.
- The judge ruled the plaintiffs failed to prove their case but explicitly stated the decision is not a blanket approval of Meta’s practices.
- In his ruling, the judge laid out a potential “roadmap” for how a future case against an AI company could succeed.
- The decision comes amid a wave of lawsuits from creators against AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
A Win for Meta, But Not for AI Training
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has secured a significant legal victory after a San Francisco federal court dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by 13 authors, including Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates. As reported by Breitbart, the authors had alleged that Meta illegally used their copyrighted books to train its Llama family of AI models.
However, the ruling from U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria on Wednesday, June 25, 2025, came with a massive caveat. He emphasized that he was ruling on the weakness of the plaintiffs’ specific arguments, not on the broader legality of using copyrighted works for AI training. “This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,” Judge Chhabria 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 Judge’s “Roadmap for Revenge”
In a highly unusual move, Judge Chhabria’s 40-page ruling essentially provided a “roadmap” for how a future lawsuit against an AI company could succeed. He noted that the authors’ arguments—that the AI could regurgitate snippets of their work or that Meta harmed a “licensing market” for training data—were weak.
He then outlined what he called a “far more promising” argument that the plaintiffs failed to make: that generative AI models could “dramatically undermine the market” for creative works by flooding the market with endless competing books, articles, and songs. He expressed surprise that this argument, central to the fears of many creators, was never mentioned in the lawsuit.
An Unsettled Legal Landscape
The ruling highlights the complex and unresolved legal questions surrounding AI and copyright. Meta praised the decision, with a spokesperson stating, “Fair use of copyright material is a vital legal framework for building this transformative technology,” according to Publishers Weekly.
The issue is far from settled, as this ruling follows a similar case where another judge found in favor of the AI company Anthropic. Judge Chhabria’s decision, rather than ending the debate, has simply provided a new, more challenging playbook for authors and creators in their ongoing fight against the tech giants.
