Apple, the technology giant, is in a new legal brawl regarding how it created its Apple Intelligence AI program. There is a gigantic copyright suit that was filed against the company with allegations that they pirated books without their consent to train their AI, a second such accusation against the company within a month.
Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik, both scientists at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, New York, instituted the proposed class suit at a court in California on October 10, 2025. Their case alleges that Apple had been clandestinely visiting “shadow libraries”, enormous web compilations of stolen books, in a bid to construct the basis of Apple Intelligence.
Central to the case is whether or not Apple had willfully embedded copyrighted work without notice or permission to authors. The training data for Apple, according to the suit, consisted of thousands of pirated e-books and other copyrighted work garnered off the web.
These neuroscientists reveal that their self-authored books were among books that had been supposedly used without permission, such as “Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions” and “Champions of Illusion: The Science Behind Mind-Boggling Images and Mystifying Brain Puzzles.”
Apple Sued Over Apple Intelligence Training Data in Growing AI Copyright Battle
Beyond simply using the work, the plaintiffs feel Apple profited significantly with the release of Apple Intelligence. Citing the suit, the stock value of Apple increased by more than $200 billion during a single day after releasing the AI system, a reportedly most profitable single day for the corporation.
They are pursuing unnamed financial damages and a court injunction against Apple not to proceed with the utilization of copyrighted work without consent.
It is not the first time that copyright infringement claims have been made against Apple through training AI. Last month, authors Jennifer Roberson and Grady Hendrix sued the company in a similar case.
Their complaint, filed in Septembe,r claimed that the company was training OpenELM AI-language models with the contentious Books3 dataset, a collection that is known to contain works that have been pirated, and with its web crawler, Applebot.
Apple is no exception to this kind of legal attention. The company is just the latest of a long-standing lineup of technology titans, who also include OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and Anthropic, to have been sued by authors and publishers regarding the training practices for its AI. They all pose basically the same question: is training an AI with copyrighted works a copyright infringement, or is this a type of “fair use”?
The lawsuit has been getting increasingly serious for the AI industry. Most recently, Anthropic pledged a staggering $1.5 billion to settle similar claims by authors against its Claude AI product, indicating that courts are serious about such claims.
Apple’s AI Lawsuits and the Precedent-Setting Clash Over Copyright
Underlying the existing litigation is a copyright protection grey area. Technology companies across the board believe that training AI models with copyrighted work is a form of fair use, a legal precept that permits a restricted utilization of copyrighted work without permission due to educational, study, or commentary purposes.
Nonetheless, publishers and authors are not convinced. They believe that computer companies are stealing their intellectual property and using it to develop money-making AI programs without even a penny in licensing rights or royalties. Once such AI programs can then create writings within comparable style or subjects, authors fear that their pieces are used to develop direct competitors.
Courts have not yet come to definitive opinions about where the line is to be drawn. The outcome of such cases as that against Apple will provide key precedent that will redefine how the whole AI industry addresses training data and copyright.
Since two class-action suits are looming at this point, Apple is facing potentially tremendous financial and legal consequences. In the event they prevail, they may have to pay substantial damages and fundamentally change the way they acquire training information for upcoming work with AI.
More generally, they are a bellwether case for the A.I. industry. As A.I. grows ever more complex and commercially meaningful, the question of how to justly remunerate originators whose work underpins their systems is unresolved. The outcome of the suits against Apple and others similarly situated is certain to shape A.I. construction practices for years to come.
