Apple has been hit with an AI lawsuit in a U.S. federal court, where authors allege the company used copyrighted books without consent or compensation to train its artificial intelligence systems.
The proposed class action was filed on Friday in the federal court for Northern California by authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson. The lawsuit claims that Apple copied protected works without seeking permission, credit or compensation from the writers.
“Apple has not attempted to pay these authors for their contributions to this potentially lucrative venture,” the filing stated. The lawsuit further alleges that Apple relied on a known body of pirated books to train its large language models under the “OpenELM” project.
Hendrix, who resides in New York, and Roberson, based in Arizona, said their works were included in the pirated dataset. Apple and legal representatives for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to media requests for comment.
The Apple AI lawsuit is the latest in a series of legal challenges targeting major technology firms accused of using copyrighted material to train artificial intelligence systems. Earlier on Friday, AI startup Anthropic disclosed in a California court filing that it had agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class action brought by authors who accused the company of using their works without approval to train its chatbot Claude. Lawyers for the plaintiffs described it as the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history, though Anthropic did not admit liability.
In June, Microsoft was also sued by a group of authors alleging their books were used without consent to train its Megatron AI model. Meta Platforms and OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, have faced similar claims over the alleged misuse of copyrighted content.
The lawsuit against Apple adds to the growing wave of intellectual property disputes surrounding artificial intelligence, as authors, publishers and content creators seek stronger protections in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.