AI wins this round as judge rules for Meta over Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and other authors

The judge basically encouraged someone with a better argument to come forward.

By Mary Kate Carr | June 26, 2025 | 9:36am

Screenshots: What Now? With Trevor Noah; Jimmy Kimmel Live! Logo: Meta

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AI wins this round as judge rules for Meta over Sarah Silverman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and other authors

A group of authors, including Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehisi Coates, have lost their lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. The writers sued the tech company over their copyrighted works being used to train Meta’s artificial intelligence large language models (LLMs) without permission. Unfortunately for them, the judge just didn’t think they brought the right evidence to the table. “On this record Meta has defeated the plaintiffs’ half-hearted argument that its copying causes or threatens significant market harm,” U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria said in his ruling (via CNBC). “That conclusion may be in significant tension with reality.”

In this case, the judge seemed to agree that Meta’s use of the work for “transformative purpose” falls under fair use. But “No matter how transformative LLM training may be, it’s hard to imagine that it can be fair use to use copyrighted books to develop a tool to make billions or trillions of dollars while enabling the creation of a potentially endless stream of competing works that could significantly harm the market for those books,” Chhabria wrote (per The Hollywood Reporter). On the other hand, “It’s easy to imagine that AI-generated books could successfully crowd out lesser-known works or works by up-and-coming authors. While AI-generated books probably wouldn’t have much of an effect on the market for the works of Agatha Christie, they could very well prevent the next Agatha Christie from getting noticed or selling enough books to keep writing.”

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In other words: the authors’ lawyers made the wrong arguments, at least in the eyes of this particular judge. In his ruling, Chhabria also pointed out some flaws in Meta’s defense, like the idea that Meta needs to have unfettered, free access to copyrighted text or else the development of LLMs would fall apart—”This is nonsense,” he wrote. “These products are expected to generate billions, even trillions, of dollars for the companies that are developing them. If using copyrighted works to train the models is as necessary as the companies say, they will figure out a way to compensate copyright holders for it.”

Nevertheless, “We appreciate today’s decision from the Court,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement (via CNBC). “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 judge more or less encouraged someone with a better argument to come forward, writing that “in the grand scheme of things, the consequences of this ruling are limited.” He wrote, “This is not a class action, so the ruling only affects the rights of these thirteen authors — not the countless others whose works Meta used to train its models. And, as should now be clear, this ruling does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful.”

This is the second significant pro-AI ruling this week, as another judge ruled in favor of AI company Anthropic and against authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace, finding that Anthropic’s use of their work was “transformative” and “fair use.” Per THR, Silverman et. al. still have a separate claim against Meta alleging that the company “illegally distributed the authors’ books during the process [of training its LLM] to pirate their works.”