Mark Zuckerberg's Meta has been accused of pirating — we are not kidding — a whole adult bookstore's worth of dirty movies to train its artificial intelligence models.First flagged by the blog TorrentFreak, a copyright company called Strike 3 Holdings and an adult film studio called Counterlife Media have filed suit against Meta, alleging that the tech giant torrented nearly 2,400 copyrighted skin flicks. All in the name of AI research, of course.According to the suit, which was filed in California federal court, Strike 3 and Counterlife discovered by tracing dozens of IP and email addresses that Meta began downloading and seeding their content via Bittorrent way back in 2018. Because of the seeding, the lawsuit alleges, the company formerly known as Facebook also allegedly engaged in "methodical and persistent distribution of those works" to other parties — including, potentially, to minors."Defendant has continuously infringed Plaintiffs’ Works for years," the suit claims, "often infringing the very same day the motion pictures are released."Citing Richard Kadrey et al v. Meta Platforms, an ongoing lawsuit brought in 2023 by authors whose work Meta has since admitted to pirating, the adult companies said they were alerted to the Zuckerberg-owned tech monolith's torrenting activities in January 2025 through coverage of that lawsuit.Using various infringement analysis and IP tracking tools, Strike 3 and Counterlife found that some 47 IP addresses associated with Meta — including "at least one residential IP address of a Meta employee" — had downloaded their copyrighted content. Stranger still, the way the data moved suggested "non-human patterns," and "the acquisition of this content [may have been] for AI training data."Though there's no exact stated reason why Meta, which long ago banned nudity on its platforms, would want to pirate all that smut, Strike 3 and Counterlife wagered a guess in the suit."Plaintiffs’ Works provide natural, human-centric imagery, which shows parts of the body not found in regular videos, and a unique form of human interactions and facial expression," the lawsuit reads, employing some choice legalistic innuendo to talk around the subject at hand. "Plaintiffs' motion pictures contain extended scenes without director cuts which enable AI models to experience continuity in a way that cannot be derived from most television shows or mainstream motion pictures."In short, Strike 3 and Counterlife seem to be claiming that Meta might have used their content to train its AI video generators, like Meta Movie Gen, to recreate human movement in ways that other stolen data simply can't quite nail, if you catch our drift."Such models will eventually create identical content for little to no cost," the suit alleges. "This will effectively eliminate Plaintiffs' future ability to compete in the marketplace."Along with the deletion of any copyrighted and pirated content and an injunction to permanently bar Meta from torrenting its work again, Counterlife and Strike 3 are seeking damages of up to $150,000 per stolen video. With 2,396 pieces of content on the line, those damages could go as high as $359 million, TorrentFreak notes.While it seems strange to consider a world where Meta was using all that raunchy content to train AI, the fact remains that the company has admitted to pirating other content. With this compelling evidence and Zuckerberg's unquenchable thirst to stay abreast of the latest tech trends, it seems conceivable that Meta actually did what's being claimed — even if it didn't necessarily plan to release the money shot, so to speak.More on Meta: Zuckerberg Is So Desperate for AI Power That He's Building Temporary Data Centers in TentsThe post Lawsuit Claims Meta Pirated Vast Numbers of Dirty Movies to "Train Its AI" appeared first on Futurism.