Apple sued by authors over alleged use of copyrighted books to train AI

Apple has been accused by authors of illegally using their copyrighted books to help train its artificial intelligence systems, reports news agency Reuters. Authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson, as per the report, have filed a lawsuit in the federal court in Northern California. The proposed class action alleges that Apple copied protected works without consent and without credit or compensation.“Apple has not attempted to pay these authors for their contributions to this potentially lucrative venture,” the lawsuit claims.The case is part of a growing wave of lawsuits from writers, publishers, and news outlets who accuse major technology firms of using copyrighted works to train artificial intelligence systems. In June, Microsoft was also sued by several authors who claimed their books were used without consent to train its Megatron AI model. Meta Platforms and Microsoft-backed OpenAI also face legal action over the alleged misuse of copyrighted materials in AI training.Another lawsuit accused Apple of training its OpenELM language models with pirated books. Authors Hendrix from New York and Roberson from Arizona said their works were among the texts used in the dataset.

Anthropic agrees to $1.5 billion settlement in copyright lawsuit from authorsMeanwhile, AI startup Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit filed by a group of authors who said the company used their books to train its chatbot Claude without permission. The agreement was disclosed in a court filing in California on Friday.Anthropic did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement. Lawyers for the authors described the deal as the largest publicly reported copyright settlement to date.