• Source:JND
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Apple is the latest tech giant to be pulled into the growing legal storm around artificial intelligence training datasets. On Friday, two authors filed a lawsuit in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that Apple illegally trained its open-source AI model, OpenELM, on pirated books.

Authors Allege Use of Pirated Books

The lawsuit, filed by Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Robertson, proposes a class action against Apple. The plaintiffs allege that their copyrighted works were part of the Books3 dataset, which has long been criticised as a trove of pirated books.

According to the filing, Apple’s OpenELM model card, shared on Hugging Face, lists RedPajama as one of its training datasets. RedPajama itself reportedly includes Books3, raising concerns that Apple indirectly used pirated content to build its model.

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What the Lawsuit Seeks

The suit demands:

  • Class statutory damages and compensatory damages
  • Restitution and disgorgement of profits
  • A court order requiring the destruction of any AI models trained on the disputed data

The plaintiffs argue that Apple knowingly benefited from copyrighted works without proper licensing or author consent.

Apple’s Position

Apple has previously stated that OpenELM does not power Apple Intelligence or other on-device AI features. Instead, the company described the model as a “contribution to the research community”, distancing it from its commercial AI ecosystem.

Wider Context: Authors vs AI Companies

Apple's suit comes just one day after another major case was settled: AI startup Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion (approx. Rs. 13,200 crore) to settle a class action suit brought by authors claiming their works had been used improperly for AI training. Although Anthropic did not admit liability in this settlement agreement, its payout makes one of the largest copyright settlements ever and could set an important precedent in similar instances such as Apple's.

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Why It Matters

With AI systems becoming mainstream, legal battles over their use of copyrighted materials in training datasets have intensified. Now Apple joins major players like OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic who are under investigation for how they source data; therefore the outcome of this case could have far-reaching ramifications for open source AI research and copyright law in general.