Neuroscientists file class action accusing Apple of training Apple Intelligence on pirated books

What happened

On Oct. 9, 2026, neuroscientists Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik of SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University filed a proposed class action in a California federal court alleging Apple trained Apple Intelligence on "shadow libraries" and web-scraped copies of copyrighted works, including their books Champions of Illusion and Sleights of Mind. The complaint alleges Apple's training datasets comprised "thousands of pirated books" and broader web-scraped content, and seeks unspecified monetary damages plus an injunction barring further use of the materials. The case arrives about a month after a separate group of authors brought a similar lawsuit against Apple over AI training copyright claims.

Why it may matter to you

This is a second front of book-corpus litigation against Apple within weeks, extending the 'shadow libraries' theory that drove the Anthropic $1.5B settlement and the Suno cases into Apple's AI stack. The injunction demand, if granted, could reach deployed Apple Intelligence models.

What is not yet known

Whether the court certifies the class, what Apple's response will be, and whether the claimed training data includes the authors' works.