Lawsuit accusing Meta of stealing from Trump’s ‘Art of the Deal’ dismissed
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 limited to the authors in the case and does not mean that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials is lawful.
“This ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful,” 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.”
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Lawyers for the plaintiffs — a group of well-known writers that includes Silverman and authors Jacqueline Woodson and Ta-Nehisi Coates — said in a statement that the “court ruled that AI companies that ‘feed copyright-protected works into their models without getting permission from the copyright holders or paying for them’ are generally violating the law.”
“Yet, despite the undisputed record of Meta’s historically unprecedented pirating of copyrighted works, the court ruled in Meta’s favor. We respectfully disagree with that conclusion,” the statement read.
Meta said it appreciates the decision.
“Open-source AI models are powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and fair use of copyright material is a vital legal framework for building this transformative technology,” the Menlo Park, California-based company said in a statement.
The Post has sought comment from Meta, the Trump Organization and the White House.
Earlier this month, a court ruled that Anthropic’s use of legally acquired books to train its Claude chatbot was fair use, but allowed a separate trial to proceed over its alleged download of pirated books.
Multiple lawsuits by news organizations against OpenAI and Microsoft for unauthorized use of news content to train AI models remain ongoing, with some claims surviving early motions but no final rulings issued yet.
With Post Wires