Apple sued by authors over allegedly training its AI on pirated books

Apple was accused of illegally using copyrighted books to train its artificial intelligence (AI) model without authors’ consent in a class action filed in the federal court in Northern California on Friday.

According to the lawsuit, Apple amassed “an enormous library of data” to train its AI model, part of which includes copyrighted works, which were obtained without authors’ consent, credit, or compensation.

Allegedly, Apple did so with the use of its Applebot, the company's scraper, which can reach “shadow libraries that host millions of other unlicensed copyrighted books,” including those written by the plaintiffs, Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson.

“Apple has not attempted to pay these authors for their contributions to this potentially lucrative venture. Apple did not seek licenses to copy and use the copyrighted books provided to its models,” the lawsuit says. “Instead, it intentionally evaded payment by using books already compiled in pirated datasets.”

The lawsuit added that Apple still holds a private AI training-data library, which hosts thousands of pirated books, all without authors’ consent.

“This conduct has deprived Plaintiffs and the Class of control over their work, undermined the economic value of their labor, and positioned Apple to achieve massive commercial success through unlawful means,” the lawsuit says.

The authors are seeking for the lawsuit to proceed as a Class action against Apple.

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This is just one of many lawsuits filed against tech giants developing generative AI. Earlier on Friday, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class action from authors who accused the AI startup of downloading pirated digital copies of millions of books to train their systems.

In February, Meta was also sued for pirating books, with the allegations stating that the company amassed at least 81.7 terabytes of data across multiple shadow libraries to train its Llama AI. However, in June, the US district judge Vince Chhabria ruled that the use of those works by Meta is considered “fair use”, meaning that no copyright liability applied.