Apple Intelligence: AI Copyright Litigation

Case Status

The Hendrix Complaint was filed on September 5, 2025, and was consolidated with Martinez-Conde v. Apple Inc., No. 4:25-cv-08695, and Alexander v. Apple, Inc., No. 4:25-cv-09090, on November 14, 2025.

On January 30, 2025, the Court appointed interim Co‑Lead Counsel for Plaintiffs: William K. Dreher (Keller Rohrback LLP) and Rohit Nath (Susman Godfrey LLP). The consolidation order anticipates Plaintiffs will file a single consolidated class action complaint, followed by a coordinated response from Defendants. The Martinez‑Conde and Alexander actions were administratively closed, with all future filings to occur on the Hendrix lead docket.

The Court has not yet set a date for the trial of this matter.

Please check this website periodically as it will be updated as the litigation progresses.

Case Overview

Plaintiffs allege that Apple Inc. built parts of its “Apple Intelligence” AI system by copying certain copyrighted works without permission or payment. Plaintiffs claim Apple trained its language models (e.g., OpenELM) using datasets that include large collections of copyrighted works from shadow‑library sources and web pages scraped by Applebot. Some of those sources include the datasets Books3 and RedPajama.

Plaintiffs further allege Apple kept copies of materials from those shadow‑library sources for ongoing and future training. In short, the suit claims Apple used authors’ works to teach its AI how to write, and to create a general library of works to use in the future, without obtaining authors’ consent or otherwise compensating authors for using their protected works.

Plaintiffs contend this conduct harms authors and the market by displacing licensing deals, reducing demand for human‑written works, and diverting income from creators. Plaintiffs seek to represent a nationwide class of U.S. copyright holders that, among other things, own a registered United States copyright in any work that Apple used to train its AI models. The complaint asserts direct copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 501 and asks for class certification, damages, an injunction stopping continued use of the works in training, potential destruction under 17 U.S.C. § 503(b) of models or datasets shown to contain those works, and attorneys’ fees and costs.

You may review the Class Action Complaint in the Case Documents section below.

09/05/2025

Class Action Complaint

11/14/2025

Consolidation Order

01/30/2026

Order Appointing Interim Co-Lead Counsel

Apple Intelligence: AI Copyright Litigation

Case Status

Case Overview

Case Documents

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