Apple Sued by Authors Alleging Copyright Infringement in AI Training
CUPERTINO, CA – Apple is facing a lawsuit accusing the company of using copyrighted books obtained from illicit online sources to train its artificial intelligence models. authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson filed the complaint, alleging Apple’s “Applebot” web crawler accessed “shadow libraries” – websites hosting pirated books – to gather data for its AI growth without obtaining licenses or providing compensation to copyright holders.
The lawsuit seeks class action status, citing the vast number of authors and works potentially impacted by the alleged infringement.According to the complaint, Apple “copied the copyrighted works” of the plaintiffs “to train AI models whose outputs compete with and dilute the market for those vrey works – works without wich Apple Intelligence would have far less commercial value.” The authors claim Apple’s actions have deprived them of control over their work and undermined the economic value of their labour.This case is part of a growing wave of copyright challenges facing companies developing generative AI technologies. OpenAI is currently defending against lawsuits from The New York Times and the oldest nonprofit newsroom in the US. recently,Anthropic,the creator of the Claude chatbot,agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement in a similar class action lawsuit brought by authors who accused the company of utilizing pirated books for AI training, with each author receiving $3,000 per work.
