Apple Faces lawsuit Alleging Copyright Infringement in AI Training
Apple is facing a class action lawsuit filed Friday in Northern California federal court, accusing the tech giant of using copyrighted books to train its artificial intelligence models without permission or compensation to the authors. The suit, brought by authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson, alleges Apple copied protected works for its “OpenELM” large language models, utilizing a dataset containing pirated material.
The lawsuit claims Apple has not sought to compensate authors for their contributions to the progress of its AI systems. Neither Apple nor legal representatives for the plaintiffs instantly responded to requests for comment.
This case is part of a growing trend of legal challenges against major technology companies regarding the use of copyrighted material in AI training. Just Friday, Anthropic disclosed a $1.5 billion settlement with a class of authors who accused the company of using their books to train its Claude chatbot without authorization. While Anthropic did not admit liability, the settlement was hailed by plaintiff’s lawyers as the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history.
Other tech companies are also facing similar accusations. Microsoft is currently defending against a lawsuit alleging the unauthorized use of copyrighted books to train its Megatron AI model. Meta Platforms and OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, have also been targeted with claims of copyright misuse in their AI training processes.
Hendrix, based in New York, and Roberson, in Arizona, assert their works where included within the allegedly pirated dataset used by Apple.
