Apple accused of piracy to train AI

Apple is facing a copyright infringement lawsuit after a group of authors claimed the company used their books without permission to train its AI models.

Among the plaintiffs are writers Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson. They allege that Applebot, the company’s web crawler, accessed pirated online libraries containing their works. The authors are now seeking class-action status and collecting claims from other affected writers.

According to the lawsuit, Apple copied copyrighted texts to build commercially valuable AI tools under its Apple Intelligence initiative. This, they argue, stripped authors of control over their work and diminished the market value of their books.

Apple is not alone in facing such claims. OpenAI and other generative AI developers have been sued over similar allegations. Most recently, Anthropic agreed to pay authors $1.5 billion to settle claims that it illegally used their works for training.