Apple is now embroiled in a legal battle after two authors—Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson—filed a proposed class-action lawsuit in a federal court in Northern California. They accuse the company of using their copyrighted books without permission to train its artificial intelligence systems.
According to the lawsuit, Apple included the authors’ works in a set of pirated books used to train its “OpenELM” large language models. The authors claim that Apple copied their works without seeking consent, providing attribution, or offering any compensation—even though the AI venture holds significant commercial promise for the company.
This case marks another escalation in the ongoing legal conflict between content creators and tech giants. Apple’s lawsuit follows a string of similar claims against other AI developers. Notably, AI startup Anthropic recently reached a historic $1.5 billion settlement with authors who alleged their books were used without proper authorization to train its Claude chatbot. Major tech companies like Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI have also been entangled in lawsuits over similar allegations.
By targeting Apple, the authors challenge how large AI models are trained, arguing that simply scraping massive volumes of text—especially from unauthorized sources—violates intellectual property rights. As debates intensify around the fair use of content in AI development, this legal action could significantly influence how tech firms obtain and use training data.
