Apple was accused by authors in a lawsuit on Friday of illegally using their copyrighted books to help train its artificial intelligence (AI) systems, part of an expanding legal fight over protections for intellectual property in the AI era.
The proposed class action, filed in the federal court in Northern California, said Apple copied protected works without consent and without credit or compensation.
“Apple has not attempted to pay these authors for their contributions to this potentially lucrative venture,” according to the lawsuit, filed by authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson.
The lawsuit is the latest in a wave of cases from authors, news outlets and others accusing major technology companies of violating legal protections for their works…
The lawsuit against Apple accused the company of using a known body of pirated books to train its “OpenELM” large language models.
Hendrix, who lives in New York, and Roberson in Arizona, said their works were part of the pirated dataset, according to the lawsuit.
MacDailyNews Take: Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta Platforms, Microsoft – to name a few – have all been hit with similar allegations of misuse of copyrighted material in AI training.
Anthropic on Friday disclosed in a court filing in California that it agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class action from a group of authors who accused the company of using their books to train its AI chatbot Claude without permission. Anthropic did not admit any liability in the settlement.
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How would they know? Apple has not released its Apple Intelligence software in full yet, it sounds like they are using a scattergun and hoping that they hit something!
Is apple going to finish?
Here’s what’s going on: On Friday, September 5, 2025, authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson filed a proposed class action lawsuit in federal court in Northern California, accusing Apple of training its AI—specifically its OpenELM large language model—using their copyrighted books without permission, credit, or compensation. The suit alleges Apple copied their works from a dataset of pirated books, including the Books3 collection, and did not attempt to pay the authors despite profiting from it