Court filing reveals Meta profits from Llama AI amidst copyright lawsuit
A court filing in the copyright lawsuit Kadrey v. Meta reveals that Meta receives revenue from hosting partners of its Llama AI model, contradicting the CEO's prior statement that selling Llama access is not Meta's business model. The disclosure occurs amid allegations that Meta trained Llama on pirated e-books.
What happened
A newly unredacted court filing in the copyright lawsuit Kadrey v. Meta reveals that Meta receives revenue-sharing payments from companies that host its Llama AI models.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in July 2024 that 'selling access' to Llama 'isn't [Meta's] business model,' but the filing shows Meta 'shares a percentage of the revenue' from hosting partners including AWS, Nvidia, Databricks, Groq, Dell, Azure, Google Cloud, and Snowflake.
The lawsuit alleges Meta trained Llama on hundreds of terabytes of pirated e-books and facilitated infringement by 'seeding' these works.
Reported impact
The revenue-sharing arrangements add significance to allegations that Meta profited from training Llama on copyrighted material without authorization.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.