Apple is facing a fresh legal battle after two authors accused the tech giant of illegally using their books to train its artificial intelligence systems.
The proposed class-action lawsuit, filed Friday in federal court in Northern California, claims Apple copied copyrighted works without permission, payment, or even credit.
“Apple has not attempted to pay these authors for their contributions to this potentially lucrative venture,” the complaint said. The suit was brought by authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson.
Neither Apple nor the authors’ lawyers immediately responded to requests for comment.
This case adds to a growing wave of lawsuits from authors, publishers, and media outlets accusing tech companies of exploiting copyrighted material to fuel AI models.
Just on Friday, AI startup Anthropic revealed it will pay $1.5 billion to settle a class action from authors who said their books were used without permission to train its chatbot Claude. The deal, which Anthropic entered without admitting fault, has been described by plaintiffs’ lawyers as the largest copyright recovery ever reported.
Other major players are also under fire. In June, Microsoft was sued by authors claiming their works were used to build its Megatron AI model. Meta and OpenAI, which is backed by Microsoft, face similar allegations.
According to the lawsuit, Apple allegedly tapped into a dataset of pirated books to train its “OpenELM” large language models. Hendrix, based in New York, and Roberson, in Arizona, said their works were among those used without consent.
