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Court filings allege that Meta obtained books and other publications from shadow libraries and used copyrighted material to train its Llama models. A 2025 ruling did not decide that this conduct was generally lawful: it granted Meta summary judgment on specific authors’ training-infringement claim because they had not meaningfully evidenced market dilution. Other theories, including distribution and contributory infringement, remained active in the case in 2026.

What the filings say Meta downloaded

In a complaint filed May 5, 2026, Elsevier alleges that Meta torrented more than two million copyrighted publications from LibGen in 2022, later torrented the Books3 collection, and acquired more than 81 terabytes of material from Anna’s Archive. These are allegations in a complaint, not findings that a court has made after trial.

The complaint also alleges that Meta’s logs for April through July 2024 recorded 134.6 terabytes downloaded and 40.42 terabytes uploaded. Those figures describe the activity the plaintiffs attribute to Meta over that period; they do not, by themselves, establish which works were involved, how each was used, or whether the alleged conduct was unlawful.

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What Books3 refers to

A separate complaint filed November 6, 2025, by Entrepreneur identifies Books3 as a collection derived from the Bibliotik private tracker and says it contained 196,640 books. The complaint alleges that Meta used torrent protocols to obtain and redistribute protected works. The figure is a description of the collection in that filing, not a court-verified count of books used to train a particular Llama model.

Why torrenting raises a distribution issue

BitTorrent is not necessarily a download-only method. As Judge Vince Chhabria explained in his June 25, 2025 order in Kadrey v. Meta, a participant can download pieces of files while also uploading pieces to other participants through “leeching” or “seeding.” That technical feature helps explain why plaintiffs allege distribution as well as copying for model training.

The protocol itself does not establish that a particular user uploaded a particular work, nor does it resolve whether a given act is legally infringing. In the Kadrey litigation, the court’s 2025 summary-judgment ruling did not resolve the alleged distribution claim. On March 25, 2026, the court allowed the plaintiffs to add distribution and contributory-infringement theories; allowing claims to proceed is not a finding that Meta is liable.

What the 2025 Kadrey ruling did—and did not—decide

On June 25, 2025, Judge Chhabria granted Meta summary judgment on the named authors’ claim that copying their books to train Llama infringed their copyrights. The reason stated in the order was that those plaintiffs had not provided meaningful evidence of market dilution. It was a decision on that claim and that evidentiary record, not a general ruling that training AI on copyrighted works is lawful.

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The judge made the limit explicit: “This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful.” The ruling concerned the named authors and their showing; it did not settle every copyright theory or resolve all claims by other rights holders.

What the licensing allegation adds

The May 2026 Elsevier complaint also describes Meta’s earlier licensing discussions. It alleges that Meta discussed raising a dataset-licensing budget from $17 million to $200 million between January and April 2023, then stopped licensing efforts after the matter was escalated to Mark Zuckerberg. Those amounts and events are allegations in the complaint, not judicial findings or proof that any specific book was licensed, downloaded, or used in training.

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How to read the claims and rulings

Record What it says Procedural status
Elsevier complaint, May 5, 2026 Alleges large-scale LibGen, Books3, and Anna’s Archive torrenting, plus specified download and upload volumes and a licensing chronology. Complaint allegations; not final findings.
Entrepreneur complaint, November 6, 2025 Identifies Books3 as a 196,640-book collection derived from Bibliotik and alleges torrent-based acquisition and redistribution. Complaint allegations; not final findings.
Kadrey v. Meta order, June 25, 2025 Granted Meta summary judgment on the named authors’ training-infringement claim because the plaintiffs lacked meaningful evidence of market dilution; did not resolve the alleged distribution claim. A limited ruling on that claim and record.
Kadrey v. Meta order, March 25, 2026 Allowed plaintiffs to add distribution and contributory-infringement theories. Claims remained to be litigated; permission to add claims is not a merits judgment.

So the careful answer to “Did Meta torrent pirated books to train Llama?” is that plaintiffs have alleged it, and court filings describe evidence and torrent activity relevant to those allegations. The available rulings described here do not establish a blanket legal answer for AI training, and the cited allegations should not be mistaken for final findings.

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