Apple is facing a fresh lawsuit over claims that it trained its artificial intelligence (AI) using copyrighted books without authorisation. Filed on Friday in the US federal court in Northern California, the class-action suit targets Apple’s OpenELM AI model, an open-source large language model (LLM) released last year.

Authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Robertson allege that Apple’s AI was trained on datasets containing pirated versions of their works. According to the lawsuit, OpenELM’s model card on Hugging Face indicates that one of its datasets, RedPajama, was used for training. RedPajama, the plaintiffs claim, included a sub-dataset called Books3, “a known body of pirated books,” which allegedly contained their copyrighted material.

The case comes amid growing scrutiny of AI companies and copyright issues. OpenELM had previously drawn criticism in 2024 when reports surfaced that parts of its training dataset included YouTube video subtitle data.

This development follows a landmark settlement in a similar lawsuit against AI company Anthropic. Authors alleged that Anthropic had used pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot, Claude. The company agreed to pay $1.5 billion in compensation, providing about $3,000 for each of an estimated 500,000 books. Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the authors, described it as “the largest copyright recovery ever” and “the first of its kind in the AI era.”

A trio of authors — thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and nonfiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — sued last year and now represent a broader group of writers and publishers whose books Anthropic downloaded to train its chatbot Claude.

A federal judge dealt the case a mixed ruling in June, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books wasn’t illegal but that Anthropic wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites.

As part of the settlement, the company has also agreed to destroy the original book files it downloaded.

Books are known to be important sources of data — in essence, billions of words carefully strung together — that are needed to build the AI large language models behind chatbots like Anthropic’s Claude and its chief rival, OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Alsup’s June ruling found that Anthropic had downloaded more than 7 million digitized books that it “knew had been pirated.” It started with nearly 200,000 from an online library called Books3, assembled by AI researchers outside of OpenAI to match the vast collections on which ChatGPT was trained.

Debut thriller novel “The Lost Night” by Bartz, a lead plaintiff in the case, was among those found in the dataset.

Anthropic later took at least 5 million copies from the pirate website Library Genesis, or LibGen, and at least 2 million copies from the Pirate Library Mirror, Alsup wrote.

The Authors Guild told its thousands of members last month that it expected “damages will be minimally $750 per work and could be much higher” if Anthropic was found at trial to have willfully infringed their copyrights. The settlement's higher award — approximately $3,000 per work — likely reflects a smaller pool of affected books, after taking out duplicates and those without copyright.