A federal judge on Wednesday sided with Facebook parent Meta Platforms in dismissing a copyright infringement lawsuit from a group of authors who accused the company of stealing their works to train its artificial intelligence technology.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup's ruling this week, in a case brought by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson last year, opens a potential pathway for AI companies to train their large language models on copyrighted works without authors' consent — but only if copies of the works were obtained legally.

A federal judge sided with Meta in a lawsuit that alleged the company had illegally trained its AI models on copyrighted works.