Apple sued for using copyrighted material to train AI, report says

Two neuroscientists are suing Apple, alleging that the company trained its AI models using pirated book libraries that included their works and the copyrighted works of others.

Apple now joins the ranks of other tech companies like Meta and OpenAI, which have also been sued over their use of copyrighted material to train AI systems. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

Typically, tech companies claim that the fair use legal doctrine allows them to use copyrighted material in this context, even without permission or payment.

The lawsuit from Dr. Susana Martinez-Conde and Dr. Stephen Macknik, professors of neuroscience at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, is actually the second lawsuit in just over a month that targets the iPhone maker for using copyrighted material to train its Apple Intelligence models.

Last month, authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson also sued Apple, claiming the company's scraper, Applebot, pulls material from "shadow libraries," online collections of unlicensed copyrighted books.

The latest lawsuit from professors Martinez-Conde and Macknik also alleges that Apple is pulling copyrighted material for AI training from shadow libraries. The two plaintiffs say that Apple trained its OpenELM model using a pirated database called Books3, a shadow library that contains research papers, novels, and other works. This is the same pirated dataset at issue in Kadrey vs. Meta and Bartz vs. Anthropic, which were ultimately decided in the AI companies' favor.

However, the issue of AI training and copyright remains unsettled while various cases work their way through the U.S. court system.

Anthropic also settled a class action lawsuit in September, after being sued by authors over the use of 500,000 pirated works to train the company's AI chatbot Claude. Last month, Anthropic agreed to settle the lawsuit for $1.5 billion.

Hendrix and Roberson's lawsuit against Apple also seeks class action status.

Apple has previously been sued over Apple Intelligence, although these two lawsuits mark the first time the company has been sued over copyright infringement claims. Earlier this year, Apple was sued for advertising Apple Intelligence features that were delayed and not yet available for consumers. Elon Musk's X also sued Apple over its partnership with ChatGPT creator OpenAI. The deal between Apple and OpenAI involves the AI giant powering some Apple Intelligence features.