Apple’s latest AI innovation, Apple Intelligence, has landed the tech giant in hot water. Two neuroscience professors, Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik from SUNY Health Sciences University, have filed a class action lawsuit against Apple, alleging that the company’s AI was trained on pirated copies of their books.
In a twist that’s as surprising as it is ironic, it seems even Apple’s AI couldn’t resist a bit of torrenting. The lawsuit, filed late last Friday, accuses Apple of using the professors’ works, “Champions of Illusion” and “Sleights of Mind,” without permission to train its Foundation Models and OpenELM language models.
According to the filing, these titles were part of Books3, a massive “shadow library” that scraped around 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 legal team will likely argue that Books3 was taken down in late 2023 for copyright infringement, and there’s no concrete proof that Apple used those specific books. However, the professors 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 been seen against OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, with varying outcomes. In one case, a judge ruled that while training on copyrighted books might be fair use, storing those books afterward could violate copyright.
Adding a layer of complexity, Apple doesn’t use its AI to summarize or republish content like Google’s AI Overviews. So, the case might hinge on whether mere training counts as copying.
For now, Apple is maintaining its silence. The professors are seeking a jury trial, financial damages, and a ban on further use of their works. Stay tuned for more updates on this developing story!
