Apple faces copyright lawsuit over training Apple Intelligence AI on pirated books: What we know so far

Apple has been sued by two authors for illegally using their copyrighted books to train its artificial intelligence model without their consent. The lawsuit filed by Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson is among the burgeoning number of legal cases aimed at protecting intellectual property in the age of artificial intelligence.

The authors argue that Apple used its scraper called Applebot to reach shadow libraries that contained copyrighted books. They argue that Apple also used this stolen content to create AI models that power its Apple Intelligence technology.

Notably, Apple Intelligence is the term that Apple uses for its AI tools that are part of its OS across iPhones, MacBook, iPad, and others.

“Apple scraped data with Applebot for nearly nine years before disclosing that it intended to train its AI systems on this scraped data,” the authors claim in their suit.

“To train the generative-AI models that are part of Apple Intelligence, Apple first amassed an enormous library of data. Part of Apple’s data library includes copyrighted works— including books created by Plaintiffs—that were copied without author consent, credit, or compensation,” they added.

“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. Instead, it intentionally evaded payment by using books already compiled in pirated datasets,” the suit further states.

Recently, Anthropic, the maker of popular chatbot Claude, agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit from a group of authors who had accused the company of using their books to train its AI chatbot.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is also being famously sued by The New York Times and the oldest nonprofit newsroom in the US for copyright infringement.

OpenAI's biggest backer Microsoft was also hit with a lawsuit by a group of authors earlier in the year who claimed that the tech giant used their books without permission for training its Megatron AI model