Apple Faces Lawsuit Over Alleged Use of Pirated Books for AI Training

Apple Inc. is facing a lawsuit filed by authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson, who accuse the tech giant of illegally using their copyrighted books to train its AI models. The lawsuit, filed in the federal court in Northern California, claims that Apple used a dataset known as Books3, which allegedly contains pirated books, to train its OpenELM language models. This dataset was reportedly mentioned in Apple's documentation as part of the RedPajama dataset, which includes Books3 according to Reuters.

The authors are seeking to have the lawsuit proceed as a class action, with requests for statutory and compensatory damages, as well as other legal remedies. They also demand the destruction of all AI models and training sets that incorporate their works. This legal action follows a similar case where Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion over the use of copyrighted books in AI training.