US Authors Sue Apple For Alleged Use Of Their Books To Train AI Models

Tech giant Apple has been sued by two authors for alleged copyright violation over use of books to train AI models. Authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson have filed a lawsuit in a federal court in Northern California, claiming that the company illegally used their copyrighted books to train its artificial intelligence models, according to a Reuters report.  

The authors have requested the court to turn their complaint into a class action suit and block the company from further infringement of similar kind, the report added.

"Apple has not attempted to pay these authors for their contributions to this potentially lucrative venture," the lawsuit mentioned.

The authors have alleged that Apple used the pirated versions of their books to train the OpenELM AI model, which the company released as an open-source model last year, according to Gadgets 360. 

OpenELM is a large language model, similar to ChatGPT, that Apple released as an open-source model last year.

This is not the first time OpenELM has faced legal trouble. In 2024, reports claimed that parts of its training dataset included YouTube video subtitles. Recently, authors have claimed that Apple copied their works without consent, credit, or compensation.

The lawsuit comes amid a growing wave of legal cases targeting tech companies for violation of copyright while using books, news articles, and other content to train AI models, according to Reuters.

"This conduct has deprived Plaintiffs and the Class of control over their work, undermined the economic value of their labour, and positioned Apple to achieve massive commercial success through unlawful means," the lawsuit mentioned, according to tech news platform Engadget.

Similar to other AI copyright cases, the authors accused the company of using pirated books from online libraries without their permission to train AI technology. 

Meanwhile, AI startup Anthropic on Friday agreed to pay $1.5 billion (approximately Rs 13,200 crore) to settle a lawsuit filed by a group of authors. These books were allegedly used to train Anthropic's AI chatbot, Claude. 

According to reports, the case has been filed by 5 lakh authors and each of them is expected to receive $3,000 (approximately Rs 2.5 lakh) per work.