Authors sue Apple for using pirated books to train AI models

Two authors have filed a lawsuit against Apple, accusing the company of using their copyrighted books without permission to train its AI models. Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson claim Apple’s web scraper accessed “shadow libraries” containing pirated works, including their own, to develop Apple Intelligence—adding to the growing legal challenges facing tech companies over AI training data.

What you should know: The lawsuit seeks class action status due to the vast number of books and authors potentially affected by Apple’s alleged use of pirated content.

• The plaintiffs argue that Apple, despite being “one of the biggest companies in the world,” made no attempt to compensate authors for their contributions to what could become a highly profitable AI venture.
• Apple’s Applebot scraper allegedly accessed unlicensed copyrighted books from shadow libraries—underground digital collections of pirated content—to train its AI models.

The legal argument: The authors claim Apple violated their copyright by using their works to create AI systems that directly compete with human-written content.

• “Apple has copied the copyrighted works of the plaintiffs to train AI models whose outputs compete with and dilute the market for those very works — works without which Apple Intelligence would have far less commercial value,” the filing states.
• The lawsuit argues this conduct has “deprived Plaintiffs and the Class of control over their work, undermined the economic value of their labor, and positioned Apple to achieve massive commercial success through unlawful means.”

The bigger picture: This case represents the latest in a series of high-profile lawsuits targeting AI companies over training data practices.

• OpenAI faces multiple lawsuits, including cases from The New York Times and the oldest nonprofit newsroom in the US.
• Anthropic, maker of the Claude chatbot, recently agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a similar class action complaint brought by authors over pirated training data.
• The Anthropic settlement will reportedly provide $3,000 per work to approximately 500,000 authors involved in the case.

Why this matters: These lawsuits are establishing crucial precedents for how AI companies must handle copyrighted content, potentially reshaping the economics of AI development and forcing tech giants to negotiate licensing deals with content creators rather than scraping data without permission.