Apple Sued for Training AI on Pirated Books

Apple is being sued in a class action over claims it trained its AI systems on pirated e‑books, according to Reuters. The plaintiffs are American authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson, who allege that Apple’s training datasets included large volumes of unauthorized pirated works and that the company neither sought permission nor paid licensing fees. They assert that the works were used to train AI models later incorporated into Apple Intelligence.

The suit argues that Apple copied protected works to train models that compete with the originals and that this erodes authors’ control and potential market value. The filing seeks class action status, potentially covering thousands of authors. The case follows similar lawsuits against OpenAI and Anthropic, with the latter reportedly reaching a $1.5 billion settlement with a class of 500,000 authors, distributing about $3,000 per work.