Apple is facing a proposed class-action lawsuit in California federal court, with two authors alleging the company trained its artificial intelligence system on pirated books. The case, filed Friday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought by authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson.
The complaint contends that Apple used its copyrighted works without approval or payment in the development of its AI models. In particular, the filing claims Apple relied on Books3, a large dataset containing nearly 200,000 illegally copied titles, to build its OpenELM and Foundation Language Models.
Part of a broader legal trend
The case joins a surge of copyright disputes targeting major technology firms over the use of creative works in AI systems. Just last week, Anthropic, the AI firm behind Claude, agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle claims from authors who alleged their books were used without permission to train its models.
Other companies, including Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI are also battling lawsuits over whether feeding copyrighted books into AI training qualifies as fair use or infringes on creators’ rights. Courts have yet to issue definitive rulings on the matter.
As of now, Apple has not issued a public comment on the lawsuit. The case is likely to draw significant attention, as it challenges how one of the world’s most valuable companies builds its next generation of AI tools.
Posted from: https://www.eweek.com/news/books3-apple-ai-lawsuit/
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