Apple has been hit with a lawsuit in California federal court by a pair of neuroscientists who say that the tech company misused thousands of copyrighted books to train its Apple Intelligence artificial intelligence model.

Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik, professors at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn, New York told the court in a proposed class action late last week that Apple used illegal “shadow libraries” of pirated books to train Apple Intelligence.

A separate group of authors sued Apple last month for allegedly misusing their work in AI training.

The lawsuit is one of many high-stakes cases brought by copyright owners such as authors, news outlets and music labels against tech companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta Platforms, over the unauthorised use of their work in AI training. Anthropic agreed to pay US$1.5-billion to settle a lawsuit from another group of authors over the training of its AI-powered chatbot Claude in August.

Spokespeople for Apple and Martinez-Conde, Macknik and their attorney did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the new complaint on Friday.

Apple Intelligence is a suite of AI-powered features integrated into iOS devices, including the iPhone and iPad.

“The day after Apple officially introduced Apple Intelligence, the company gained more than $200-billion in value: ‘the single most lucrative day in the history of the company’,” the lawsuit said.

Monetary damages

According to the complaint, Apple utilised datasets comprising thousands of pirated books as well as other copyright-infringing materials scraped from the internet to train its AI system.

The lawsuit said that the pirated books included Martinez-Conde and Macknik’s 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.