Mike Huckabee, former Arkansas governor, and a group of religious authors filed a class action suit against Meta, Bloomberg, Microsoft, and the EleutherAI Institute, arguing they trained artificial intelligence tools on the authors’ books without permission when they used Books3, a text dataset compiled by independent developers.

In their complaint, the plaintiffs emphasized how essential Books3, which contained their works, was in training the LLM products.They claim that the LLM products of Meta, Microsoft, and Bloomberg cannot function without the use of Books3, making the models infringing derivative works of the allegedly incorporated copyrighted materials within the dataset. Plaintiffs further argued that the defendants were vicariously liable for infringement because every output of the LLMs is also an infringing derivative work, but the plaintiffs did not identify who the direct infringer is in those instances.