Apple is facing a California lawsuit from authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson. They claim that Apple used their books to train its artificial intelligence models, including OpenELM and Apple Intelligence, without permission, infringing on their copyrights.
The lawsuit states that Apple used the Books3 dataset, which contains over 196,000 pirated books, including works by Hendrix and Roberson. Additionally, the complaint accuses Apple of using its Applebot web crawler to copy website content and extract information from so-called "shadow libraries."
The plaintiffs are seeking damages and asking the court to issue an order prohibiting Apple from using their works without authorization. The core issue in this case is whether large technology companies can legally use copyrighted materials when developing artificial intelligence models.
Notably, before this, Apple had sued Anthropic, which eventually reached a settlement over similar copyright claims. This indicates that copyright issues regarding artificial intelligence training data have become an increasingly prominent legal challenge.
