Book publisher Chicken Soup for the Soul sued several Big Tech companies — including Apple — in California federal court late Tuesday for allegedly misusing its content to train their artificial intelligence systems, reports Reuters.
The publisher said that Apple, Google, Nvidia, Meta Platforms, OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity AI and Elon Musk’s xAI used pirated copies of its books to teach their chatbots to respond to human prompts.
From the lawsuit: This case concerns a straightforward and deliberate act of theft that constitutes copyright infringement. Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, Apple, Perplexity, and NVIDIA, illegally copied vast quantities of copyrighted books without permission and then used those stolen copies to build and train their commercial large language models (“LLMs”) and/or optimize their product. Defendants helped themselves to the copyrighted works of thousands of authors—including bestselling writers, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, and creators of widely read nonfiction and fiction.
This isn’t the first such accusation against Apple. In October 2025 a pair of academic authors launched a class action suit against Apple, because Apple Intelligence training allegedly used a repository of books known to contain pirated copy of their books.
Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik, professors at SUNY Health Sciences University in New York, claims that “Champions of Illusion: The Science Behind Mind-Boggling Images and Mystifying Brain Puzzles” and “Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions” were raided without licensing to train Apple Intelligence.
And in September 2025 Apple was accused by authors in a lawsuit of illegally using their copyrighted books to help train its artificial intelligence systems, part of an expanding legal fight over protections for intellectual property in the AI era.
The lawsuit was filed in the federal court in Northern California, and claims Apple copied protected works without consent and without credit or compensation. Apple hasn’t attempted to pay these authors for their contributions to this potentially lucrative venture,” according to the lawsuit, filed by authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson.
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Article provided with permission from AppleWorld.Today