Two authors, Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson, are suing Apple, alleging the company violated their copyright protections and illegally acquired and used their books to train its AI, according to a complaint filed Friday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California in San Francisco.

The authors claim Apple used a software program called Applebot to scrape data from "shadow libraries" such as Books3. The authors' novels were included in the pirated library and thus used to develop Apple's AI without their consent.

"Apple has not attempted to pay these authors," the complaint reads. "Apple did not seek licenses to copy and use the copyrighted books provided to its models. Instead, it intentionally evaded payment by using books already compiled in pirated datasets.

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