Apple is facing a lawsuit from authors who accuse the company of training its artificial intelligence systems on pirated books. Writers Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson claim Apple relied on Books3, a dataset containing copyrighted works obtained without permission, to develop its OpenELM language models.
The lawsuit states that Apple included their books in the dataset without consent, credit, or compensation. The authors argue that Apple’s use of Books3 amounts to copyright infringement and want the court to certify the case as a class action. They are seeking damages, restitution, and an order for Apple to destroy AI models trained with the pirated material.
Details of the Case
According to the complaint, Apple referenced RedPajama in its research paper on OpenELM, published last year on Hugging Face. RedPajama incorporates Books3, which the lawsuit identifies as a collection of pirated books. The authors argue that this disclosure directly ties Apple to the use of their copyrighted works in AI training.
As reported by Reuters, the case was filed in federal court in Northern California. The filing alleges that Apple copied protected works “without consent and without credit or compensation.” Hendrix, based in New York, and Roberson, in Arizona, both claim their published works were among the pirated materials. Apple has not yet responded to the allegations, according to the report.
The lawsuit seeks multiple remedies. These include statutory and compensatory damages, disgorgement of profits, attorneys’ fees, and an injunction blocking Apple from using infringing datasets in future models. The plaintiffs also want the court to order the destruction of any Apple Intelligence models that contain copyrighted works.
Apple case adds to a growing wave of litigation against technology companies accused of misusing copyrighted content for AI training. In recent months, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI have all faced similar lawsuits from authors and publishers.
The legal pressure has already led to settlements. On Friday, Reuters reported that AI startup Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to resolve a class action brought by authors who said their books were used without permission to train its Claude chatbot. Lawyers called it the largest publicly reported copyright settlement to date, though Anthropic denied liability.
Apple now joins a list of major firms facing scrutiny over how they build and train their AI systems, with courts set to decide how far copyright protections extend into the new AI era.
