Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates (born 1975) became one of the defining American writers of his generation at The Atlantic — where “The Case for Reparations” (2014) reframed a national debate — then with Between the World and Me, which won the 2015 National Book Award. He has since ranged across Black Panther comics for Marvel, the novel The Water Dancer, and the 2024 essay collection The Message.

Joining the fight over Llama

In December 2023 Coates joined Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and a dozen other writers as a named plaintiff in Kadrey v. Meta, the Northern District of California class action alleging Meta trained its Llama models on millions of books pirated from shadow libraries such as LibGen — with internal warnings about “illegal pirated websites” overridden and the decision escalated to Mark Zuckerberg. Coates is separately a plaintiff in the authors’ consolidated case against OpenAI, which forced disclosure of details about ChatGPT’s training data.

In June 2025 Judge Vince Chhabria handed Meta summary judgment on fair use while stressing the win was on the record these plaintiffs built, not the merits of the conduct: the ruling “does not stand for the proposition that Meta’s use of copyrighted materials to train its language models is lawful.” The books at issue for Coates included works that took years of archival research to write — exactly the “high quality” data the complaint says Meta needed and declined to license.

Coates has made no crusade of the issue in his public writing, which remains focused on race, history, and Palestine; his AI stance is registered through the lawsuits themselves — a bet that the courts, not the culture war, are where writers’ claims on their own work will be decided.