Apple sued for AI training misuse

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Apple’s shiny new Apple Intelligence just got hit with a very un-Apple problem: a class action lawsuit. 

Two neuroscience professors, Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik from SUNY Health Sciences University, are suing Apple, claiming the company trained its AI on pirated copies of their books. 

Yep, even Apple’s AI apparently couldn’t resist a bit of torrenting nostalgia.

The lawsuit, filed late Friday, accuses Apple of using their works, “Champions of Illusion” and “Sleights of Mind,”  without permission to train its Foundation Models and OpenELM language models. 

According to the filing, those titles were part of Books3, a massive “shadow library” that scraped roughly 186,000 books from a private BitTorrent tracker called Bibliotik. 

Books3 was once bundled into a dataset called The Pile, which Apple itself acknowledged using in documentation for OpenELM back in April 2024.

Apple’s lawyers will probably point out that Books3 was taken down in late 2023 for, you guessed it, copyright infringement, and that there’s no clear proof Apple actually used those exact books. 

Still, the authors argue that if their titles were in the dataset, Apple “copied them in their entirety without authorization,” which could mean up to $150,000 per work in damages if the court finds willful infringement.

This isn’t the first time AI training data has landed a tech giant in court. Similar lawsuits have popped up against OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, with mixed results. 

In one case, a judge even ruled that while training on copyrighted books might be fair use, storing those books afterward could violate copyright.

There’s also a subtle twist: Apple doesn’t use its AI to summarize or republish content (like Google’s often-misleading AI Overviews), so the case might hinge on whether mere training counts as copying.

For now, Apple’s keeping quiet. The professors are asking for a jury trial, financial damages, and a ban on further use of their works.