A group of writers is taking on Apple, filing a class-action lawsuit in a federal court. The case landed in the Northern District of California. These authors claim Apple illegally used their books to train its artificial intelligence systems.
The lawsuit states that Apple copied their work. This happened without any permission from the creators. The tech giant reportedly gave no credit and offered no payment for these works. The complaint adds that Apple did not even try to pay the authors.
According to the legal filing, Apple used groups that publish pirated books. This was done to train its large language model called OpenELM. This specific accusation raises new questions about how AI companies source their training data.
This lawsuit is not a standalone event. It highlights a growing wave of frustration from creators. Owners of intellectual property are pushing back. They are speaking out against AI companies using their work without consent.
Just recently, on Friday, September 6th, there was big news in this space. Reports showed that Anthropic, another AI firm, agreed to pay authors over $1.5 billion. This payment settled a class-action lawsuit against them. The lawsuit claimed Anthropic used the writers’ books without permission to train its AI model, Claude. Anthropic, for its part, did not admit to any wrongdoing in the settlement.