Apple has become the subject of another class action lawsuit over alleged illegal use of copyrighted materials to train its artificial intelligence models.
According to Bloomberg Law, two neuroscience professors at SUNY Downstate Health in Brooklyn, Susana Martinez-Conde and Steven Macknick, have accused the company of using their copyrighted work without permission. The scientists allege that Apple trained its AI models using “shadow libraries” and web scraping programs that provide access to pirated copies of books, including two of their own.
This is the second such lawsuit against Apple in the past month. Earlier, another group of authors also filed a lawsuit, claiming that the company violated copyright by using their texts to train Apple Intelligence without consent.
Similar accusations have been leveled at other tech companies. OpenAI is currently suing The New York Times, and Anthropic this year agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by more than half a million authors whose works were used to train AI.