Apple is facing a new lawsuit in California that accuses the company of using copyrighted books without permission to train its artificial intelligence systems.
The proposed class action was filed in federal court in Northern California by authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson, who say their works were included in a dataset of pirated books allegedly used to train Apple’s OpenELM large language models. “Apple has not attempted to pay these authors for their contributions to this potentially lucrative venture,” the lawsuit claims, reports Reuters.
Neither Apple nor the authors’ legal team commented immediately on the filing.
This case adds to a growing list of legal battles between creators and major tech companies over the use of copyrighted works in AI training. Earlier this year, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI were each targeted in similar lawsuits.
So what’s the big deal? Books are super useful for training AI because they’re well-written and go deep into stories, facts, and ideas. That helps AI learn how to write properly, keep a story flowing, and sound natural in different styles. The problem is, some of these books were used without the authors’ permission. Writers say it’s unfair that their work is helping tech companies make money while they get nothing in return.
On Friday, AI startup Anthropic disclosed it would pay $1.5 billion US to settle a class action from authors who accused it of using their books without consent to train its chatbot, Claude—a deal described by plaintiffs’ lawyers as the largest copyright recovery ever reported.
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