Apple Sued By Writer For Use Of Books In AI Training

JAKARTA - The tech giant Apple was accused by a group of writers in a lawsuit on Friday 5 September for illegally using their copyrighted books to train its artificial intelligence (AI) system. This is part of an increasingly widespread legal battle over intellectual property protection in the AI era.

The proposed class action lawsuit filed in a federal court in Northern California, states that Apple copies protected works without approval, without credit, or compensation.

"Apple has never tried to pay these writers for their contribution to this potentially profitable venture," according to the lawsuit, filed by writers totaled Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson.

Apple and the plaintiffs' lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.

The lawsuit is the latest in a wave of cases from writers, news outlets, and other parties accusing big tech companies of violating the legal protection of their work.

Anthropic's artificial intelligence startup on Friday revealed in a court filing in California that the company agreed to pay $1.5 billion to complete a class action of a group of writers accusing companies of using their books to train AI chatbot Claude without permission.

Anthropic did not recognize any legal obligations in the agreement, which the plaintiffs' lawyers called the biggest copyright recovery publicly reported in history.

In June, Microsoft was also sued by a group of writers claiming the company used their books without permission to train its Megatron artificial intelligence model. Microsoft-backed Meta Platforms, and OpenAI also face charges of copyrighted material abuse in AI training.

Apple's lawsuit alleges the company used a collection of known pirated books to train its big "OpenelM" language model.

Hendrix, who lives in New York, and Roberson in Arizona, said their works were included in the pirated dataset, according to the lawsuit.