‘Meta has stolen books’: authors to protest in London against AI trained using ‘shadow library’.

On April 3, 2025, a group of writers, authors and other publishing professionals went to the London headquarters of Meta, a leading tech company with a particular interest in AI, to protest the unauthorized use of copyrighted works in training the company's artificial intelligence model.

This stance came about as a result of a series of events in recent months. Earlier this year, the company's use of a “shadow library,” approved by Mark Zuckerberg himself, was confirmed. The resource in question is called LibGen and contains more than 7.5 million books: obviously copyrighted works. A recent publication by Atlantic, moreover, provided a searchable database of all the content in the library in question - a resource that allowed several authors to find out whether their work had been exploited by Meta.

A Meta spokesperson said, “We respect the intellectual property rights of third parties and believe that our use of the information to train artificial intelligence models is consistent with applicable laws.”