Two authors, Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson, are suing Apple, alleging the company violated their copyright protections and illegally acquired and used their books to train its AI, according to a complaint filed Friday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco.
The authors claim Apple used a software program called Applebot to scrape data from «shadow libraries» such as Books3. The authors’ novels were included in the pirated library and thus used to develop Apple’s AI without their consent.
«Apple has not attempted to pay these authors,» the complaint reads. «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.»
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.
Data sources like these are immensely valuable to companies developing generative AI models. They need huge quantities of high-quality, human-created content to improve AI models, to make them sound more coherent and human-like. But negotiating with and paying creators for access to their works can be costly and time-consuming, which is why we see so many copyright infringement lawsuits.
On the same day the Apple lawsuit was filed, Claude-maker Anthropic announced it would pay $1.5 billion to authors in a class-action piracy lawsuit, resulting in about $3,000 per pirated work. It was derived from a similar copyright case where Anthropic won part of its case, with the judge ruling Anthropic’s use of the copyrighted material was fair use. Two days after that initial ruling, Meta won a similar case.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
Copyright is one of the most important and controversial legal issues for AI companies and creators. While some tech companies have struck multimillion-dollar deals with publishers to access their content, others are duking it out in court in cases like these. Tech companies have been fighting hard for fair-use exceptions, a legal concept in copyright law that lets people use copyrighted content without the rights holders’ permission, such as for education or journalism. Creators are fighting to ensure AI companies aren’t allowed to ignore decades of copyright law precedent just to avoid paying them licensing fees and to ensure they’re able to potentially opt out of having their work used to train AI systems.
Apple released its AI last year during its annual WWDC developers conference. The iPhone-maker has had a slow entrance into the AI race, marked by delays of its promised smarter Siri. By contrast, Samsung, Google and Motorola phones are all chock-full of Gemini and other AI — for better or worse — whereas Apple’s main AI tool is the ability to use ChatGPT via Siri voice commands.
But even that existing Apple Intelligence feature is under fire. Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against Apple and ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI earlier this summer, alleging the deal is an «anticompetitive scheme» for blocking out other AI products, like Musk’s own Grok.
All of this comes just days before Apple’s annual fall event, where it is expected to drop the iPhone 17. It’s the biggest event of the year for Apple and its enthusiasts, with the next generation of software, iOS 26, expected to drop for all iPhone users in the days following the event. Any AI news we hear at tomorrow’s «Awe dropping» event is likely to crop up in future developments in this lawsuit.
