March 20, 2025, The Authors Guild:

Today, The Atlantic published a search tool that allows authors to check if their works are in LibGen, an illegal pirate site AI companies copied for their AI systems. This is a similar tool to the one that journalist Alex Reisner previously made available for the Books3 AI training dataset last year, but this new list has more than 7.5 million books that were copied, at least in part if not in full, by Meta and other AI companies for their AI systems. It is not clear whether Meta downloaded and used every book in LibGen.   

Pirate Sites Are Illegal Sources of Books for AI Training 

The Authors Guild has collaborated with publishers and the federal government to combat major piracy websites that cost authors millions in lost sales. We took down Z-Library and more than 250 mirror sites, successfully sued Kiss Library, and assisted publishers in actions against LibGen, resulting in blocked U.S. domains and multi-million-dollar fines. These sites remain challenging to permanently eliminate as they operate from Russia or Ukraine—beyond U.S. jurisdiction—and quickly migrate to new domains when blocked.  

Meta and other AI companies knew exactly what they were doing but they did it anyway. Why? Because they needed books for their quality writing, style, expression, and long-form narration and would rather steal them than ask and pay for them as they do for all of the other necessary components of their AI, such as electricity and programming.