Authors are suing Apple for training AI with books

Apple has been sued by two American authors who accuse the company of illegally using their copyrighted works to train artificial intelligence (AI) systems, according to a recent report by Reuters.

The proposed class action was filed on September 5, 2025 in the federal court for the Northern District of California by Grady Hendrix, a novelist based in New York, and Jennifer Roberson, who lives in Arizona. 

The complaint against Apple alleges that the company relied on a dataset of pirated books to train its "OpenELM" large language models, which the plaintiffs say included their works. 

"Apple has not attempted to pay these authors for their contributions to this potentially lucrative venture," the lawsuit said. 

In recent months, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI have faced similar lawsuits, while last week AI startup Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a case brought by a group of authors who alleged their books had been used without permission to train its Claude chatbot. That settlement, which did not involve an admission of liability, was described by lawyers as the largest publicly reported copyright recovery to date.

In June, Microsoft was also sued by authors who claimed their books had been used without authorisation to develop its Megatron AI model.