Neuroscientists Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen L. Macknik have filed a class action lawsuit against technology giant Apple Inc. The complaint, lodged with the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that the company committed widespread copyright infringement in the development of its new artificial intelligence system, ‘Apple Intelligence’.

Specifically, the plaintiffs assert that Apple utilised datasets comprised of thousands of copyrighted works, including their own published books, without consent or remuneration. The filing maintains that Apple scraped material from illicit sources, notably ‘shadow libraries” of pirated books, to train its Large Language Models (LLMs). Consequently, this uncompensated use allegedly allowed Apple to develop a core product, Apple Intelligence, thus boosting the firm’s market value significantly upon its announcement by over $200 billion.

Furthermore, the professors seek to represent a class of similarly situated copyright holders whose works Apple allegedly copied unlawfully. Whilst the suit requests a jury trial and unspecified monetary damages, a central demand calls for the destruction of all LLM models and their training sets that incorporate the pirated materials. Therefore, the outcome of this case holds considerable implications for how tech firms acquire data to fuel the rapidly expanding field of generative AI.

Allegations Against Apple In Detail

The core of the plaintiffs’ claim rests on the assertion that Apple deliberately sourced illegal copies of copyrighted material to construct the foundation of Apple Intelligence. Notably, the lawsuit identifies two key repositories of pirated data allegedly used by the defendant: the controversial Books3 collection and the larger dataset known as The Pile. 

Crucially, Apple’s GitHub repository revealed that training of the company’s language models relied, in part, on The Pile. However, the plaintiffs contend that The Pile fundamentally incorporates the Books3 shadow library, a repository infamous for containing over 170000 pirated electronic books as of 2023.

Accordingly, the neuroscientists’ works, ‘Champions of Illusion’ and ‘Sleights of Mind’, became part of this corpus. The complaint stresses that since their titles were present in the training datasets used, Apple copied the works in their entirety without any form of authorisation. They claim that Apple’s documentation itself provides the necessary proof of infringement by referencing The Pile as a training source. 

The filing explicitly quotes the legal premise of their case, stating: “Because Plaintiffs’ copyrighted book is part of Books3, Apple copied in its entirety without authorization, and trained OpenELM, on one or more copies of the Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works and directly infringed Plaintiffs’ copyrights along with the copyrights of the Class.”

A Timeline Of Copyright…


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Last Update: October 13, 2025