Meta sued over alleged use of pirated adult content for AI training

Strike 3 Holdings, an adult film studio, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta Platforms, Inc. in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on July 23, 2025. The complaint alleges that Meta downloaded and distributed 2,396 of Strike 3’s copyrighted works via the BitTorrent protocol, in some cases on the same day new pieces of work were released.

According to the filing, Strike 3 claims Meta used both its corporate and concealed IP addresses, as well as residential IPs connected to employees, to obtain and distribute the content. The studio’s proprietary detection systems, VXN Scan and Cross Reference Tool, allegedly logged more than 100,000 unauthorized distributions linked to Meta’s infrastructure.

The lawsuit further alleges Meta targeted the content to accelerate its downloading of additional files by leveraging BitTorrent’s "tit-for-tat" protocol (used to encourage peers to share files and prevent free-riding), and asserts that the works were used to train Meta’s AI models, including LLaMA 4 and Movie Gen. The complaint also states this would allow Meta to eventually generate content that resembles Strike 3’s productions, which has the potential to impact the studio’s ability to compete.

Strike 3 is seeking statutory damages, a permanent injunction barring Meta from further use of its works, and removal of all identified files from Meta’s systems. Lastly, the studio also asserts it did not authorize Meta to use its films for AI training or any other purpose and points to previous lawsuits alleging that Meta used pirated content to train its language models.

Meta has not commented publicly on the allegations as of this writing.