Five major publishers sued Meta Platforms in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, alleging that the tech giant misused their books and journal articles to train its artificial intelligence models.

Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan and McGraw Hill, as well as author Scott Turow, alleged in the proposed class-action complaint that Meta pirated millions of their works and used them without permission to train its Llama large language models to respond to human prompts.

“Meta’s mass-scale infringement isn’t public progress, and AI will never be properly realized if tech companies prioritize pirate sites over scholarship and imagination,” Maria Pallante, the president of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement.

Meta has denied any wrongdoing.

“AI is powering transformative innovations, productivity and creativity for individuals and companies, and courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use,” a Meta spokesperson responded in a statement on Tuesday. “We will fight this lawsuit aggressively.“

The publishers allege that Meta pirated works ranging from textbooks to scientific articles to novels including The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin and The Wild Robot by Peter Brown for its AI training. They asked the court for permission to represent a larger class of copyright owners and an unspecified amount of monetary damages.

The lawsuit opens a new front in the ongoing copyright battle between creators and tech companies over AI training, in which dozens of authors, news outlets, visual artists and other plaintiffs have sued companies including Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic for infringement. All of the pending cases are likely to revolve around whether AI systems make fair use of copyrighted material by using it to create new, transformative content. The first two judges to consider the matter issued diverging rulings last year. Amazon- and Google-backed Anthropic was the first major AI company to settle one of the cases, agreeing last year to pay a group of authors $1.5bn to resolve a class-action lawsuit that could have cost the company billions more in damages for alleged piracy. The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement as well.

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Twelve US copyright cases against OpenAI and Microsoft have been consolidated in New York, despite most of the authors and news outlets suing the companies being opposed to centralisation.

A transfer order made by the US judicial panel on multidistrict litigation on Thursday said that centralisation will “allow a single judge to coordinate discovery, streamline pretrial proceedings, and eliminate inconsistent rulings”.

Cases brought in California by prominent authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Michael Chabon, Junot Díaz and the comedian Sarah Silverman will be transferred to New York and joined with cases brought by news outlets, including the New York Times, and other authors including John Grisham, George Saunders, Jonathan Franzen and Jodi Picoult.

Most of the plaintiffs opposed consolidation, arguing that their cases were too different to be combined. However, the transfer order states that the cases “share factual questions arising from allegations that OpenAI and Microsoft used copyrighted works, without consent or compensation, to train their large language models (LLMs) … which underlie defendants’ generative artificial intelligence products” such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot.

OpenAI had proposed consolidating the cases in northern California. The judicial panel ultimately transferred the cases to the southern district of New York, stating that centralisation would “serve the convenience of the parties and witnesses” and “promote the just and efficient conduct of this litigation”.

“Given the novel and complicated nature of the technology, there likely will be overlapping experts” across the cases, read the order. Consolidation will “conserve the resources of the parties, their counsel and the judiciary”.

Tech companies have argued that their use of copyrighted works to train AI is permitted under the doctrine of “fair use”, allowing the unauthorised use of copyrighted works under certain circumstances.

An OpenAI spokesperson said: “We welcome this development and look forward to making it clear in court that our models are trained on publicly available data, grounded in fair use, and supportive of innovation,” reported Reuters.

Steven Lieberman, the attorney representing Daily News, said that the company looks forward to “continuing to prove in New York that Microsoft and OpenAI committed widespread theft of millions of Times and Daily News works”.

Many of the prominent authors suing OpenAI have also sued Meta for copyright infringement in its training of AI models. A January court filing by Coates, Silverman and Díaz among others alleged that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg approved the company’s use of a notorious “shadow library”, LibGen, which contains more than 7.5m books.

On Thursday, authors gathered outside the Meta offices in London to protest the company’s use of copyrighted books. Placards at the demonstration included “Get the Zuck off our books” and “I’d write a better sign but you’d just steal it”, according to trade magazine the Bookseller.

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Thursday also saw Amazon confirm that a new Kindle feature, “Recaps”, offering users refreshers on storylines and character arcs of a book series to review before they pick up the next book, will be AI-generated. “We use technology, including GenAI and Amazon moderators, to create short recaps of books that accurately reflect book content,” Amazon spokesperson Ale Iraheta told TechCrunch.

“By adding a new level of convenience to series reading, the Recaps feature enables readers to dive deeper into complex worlds and characters without losing the joy of discovery, all while ensuring an uninterrupted reading experience across every genre,” wrote the company in a blogpost. However, Reddit users raised concerns about the accuracy of AI-generated summaries.

Earlier this week, it emerged that the UK government is trying to placate peer and Labour backbencher concerns about its copyright proposals – which involve allowing AI companies to train models on copyrighted materials unless rights holders opt out – by pledging to assess the economic impact of the plans.