Apple is facing a proposed class-action lawsuit in California federal court, with two authors alleging the company trained its artificial intelligence system on pirated books. The case, filed Friday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought by authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson.
The complaint contends that Apple used its copyrighted works without approval or payment in the development of its AI models. In particular, the filing claims Apple relied on Books3, a large dataset containing nearly 200,000 illegally copied titles, to build its OpenELM and Foundation Language Models.
“Apple is building part of this new enterprise [Apple Intelligence] using Books3, a dataset of pirated copyrighted books that includes the published works of Plaintiffs and the Class. Apple used Books3 to train its OpenELM language models. Apple also likely trained its Foundation Language Models using this same pirated dataset,” according to the complaint.
The filing further alleges that Applebot, the company’s web crawler, could reach “shadow libraries,” which host large collections of unlicensed digital books.
“Applebot can also reach “shadow libraries” that host millions of other unlicensed copyrighted books, including, on information and belief, Plaintiffs’ and Class Members’ copyrighted works,” the filing read.
Authors say they were ignored
Hendrix and Roberson are urging the court to grant class-action status, arguing that many other writers’ works were likely used in a similar manner. They are seeking compensation for damages and an order preventing Apple from further using pirated works in its AI training.
The authors also argue that Apple’s actions have caused economic harm.
“This conduct has deprived Plaintiffs and the Class of control over their work, undermined the economic value of their labor, and positioned Apple to achieve massive commercial success through unlawful means,” according to the lawsuit.
Part of a broader legal trend
The case joins a surge of copyright disputes targeting major technology firms over the use of creative works in AI systems. Just last week, Anthropic, the AI firm behind Claude, agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle claims from authors who alleged their books were used without permission to train its models.
Other companies, including Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI are also battling lawsuits over whether feeding copyrighted books into AI training qualifies as fair use or infringes on creators’ rights. Courts have yet to issue definitive rulings on the matter.
As of now, Apple has not issued a public comment on the lawsuit. The case is likely to draw significant attention, as it challenges how one of the world’s most valuable companies builds its next generation of AI tools.
The US Copyright Office has weighed in on AI training and fair use. Its findings could reshape rules for creators and developers.
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