Scandal: It was discovered that Meta had used torrent files to download millions of copyrighted books
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has been caught in the eye of a storm after it was revealed that it downloaded millions of copyrighted books via torrent files, now putting Mark Zuckerberg's company in the crosshairs of a multimillion-dollar lawsuit.
To put it in perspective, previous hacking cases that barely amounted to 0.008% of Meta’s download volume were enough to trigger criminal investigations by the US Attorney’s Office. Now imagine the depth of what happened.
According to recently declassified court documents, Meta reportedly downloaded at least 81.7 terabytes of pirated book data from all sorts of “shadow libraries,” including Z-Library and LibGen. The goal? The ability to inject their own AI models, bypassing any kind of rules.
What’s even more astonishing is that the practice would continue despite warnings issued internally. Leaked emails show that some employees did not approve of what was being done. One engineer, Nikolai Bashlikov, went so far as to say that “downloading torrents from a company laptop is not a good idea” and warned of the legal risks of file sharing.
You can already imagine Meta’s response. They defended their actions by saying that using copyrighted books to train their AI models constituted “fair use” within the legal framework.
Despite all the controversy, the company is investing heavily in developing new chatbots and AI agents, seeking to compete with other leaders in the sector. Meta is working on Llama 4, a next-generation language model, aiming to outperform competitors like GPT-4 in terms of accuracy and performance.
One of Meta’s biggest competitors in this space is DeepSeek, a Chinese AI that has already exploded and has surprised with its speed and ability to process language. Faced with this huge challenge, Meta is looking to not lose ground and put itself back at the top of the AI industry with more advanced models, personal assistants, and better infrastructure.
To achieve this, Zuckerberg's company is focusing on three pillars in which it is already investing millions of dollars: customizing AI agents, developing Llama 4, and creating an AI engineering agent.
While Meta is facing all this controversy over the use of pirated content, the company is also in the spotlight for its automation plans. Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that the company is working on developing an AI that can replace mid-level programmers, which could save the company between $100,000 and $900,000 per year for each programmer replaced.
This news has come as a bombshell, as it puts on the table a lot of doubts and concerns about the future of work for programmers. Zuckerberg says that AI will not only create code for Meta’s apps and tools but will also lead to a major shift towards a more automated work model across the industry.
Of course, the current situation at Meta is a mess. On the one hand, the company is facing serious legal charges for using pirated content that could cost it millions of dollars in fines and reputational damage. On the other hand, it is betting more than ever on artificial intelligence as the future of its business, even if it means leaving part of its human workforce behind.