Judge dismisses lawsuit claiming Meta used Trumps Art of the Deal to train Llama AI

Meta has prevailed in a high-profile federal lawsuit claiming that it allegedly trained its powerful AI model, Llama, on a vast trove of copyrighted books — including President Donald Trump’s own “The Art of the Deal.”The lawsuit, filed two years ago by authors Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden and comedian Sarah Silverman, claims the tech giant behind Facebook and Instagram used more than 190,000 copyrighted books without authorization or compensation.Among the titles reportedly used to train Meta’s language model are “The Art of the Deal” as well as books by Trump’s children Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr.The authors had argued in court filings that Meta is “liable for massive copyright infringement” by taking their books from online repositories of pirated works and feeding them into Meta’s flagship generative AI system Llama.Meta countered in court filings that US copyright law “allows the unauthorized copying of a work to transform it into something new” and that the new, AI-generated expression that comes out of its chatbots is fundamentally different from the books it was trained on.Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has been working hard to curry favor with President Trump since he won last fall’s election, including meeting with him at Mar-a-Lago, donating $1 million to his inaugural fund and hiring Republican strategists to guide Meta’s political positioning.He has also shifted Meta’s content moderation policies to align more closely with conservative priorities and publicly praised Trump’s stance on technology and free speech.According to court filings, Meta acknowledged that its training data included copyrighted material, raising serious questions about whether this practice constitutes fair use — particularly since Llama is intended for commercial use.US District Judge Vince Chhabria found that 13 authors who sued Meta “made the wrong arguments” and tossed the case.But the judge also said that the ruling is li...