Chicken Soup for the Soul sues Apple, Google, Meta and others over AI training
Publisher Chicken Soup for the Soul filed a lawsuit against eight major technology companies in California federal court, alleging they used pirated copies of its books downloaded from illegal shadow-library websites to train their artificial intelligence systems without permission. The complaint accuses the defendants of copyright infringement through deliberate theft of copyrighted works.
What happened
Chicken Soup for the Soul sued Apple, Google, Nvidia, Meta Platforms, OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity AI, and xAI in California federal court, alleging the companies used pirated copies of its books to train their artificial intelligence systems.
The lawsuit alleges the companies downloaded bootleg copies of Chicken Soup for the Soul books from shadow-library websites including The Pile, LibGen, Z-Library, and Anna's Archive, then reproduced and embedded those works into their large language models without permission.
Reported impact
The publisher holds that the defendants engaged in a deliberate act of theft and copyright infringement by illegally copying vast quantities of copyrighted books belonging to thousands of authors, including bestselling writers and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists.
Index analysis
Apple has previously stated that The Pile dataset was used only for research purposes and not in models powering Apple Intelligence or machine learning features, according to a 2024 statement regarding a separate AI training accusation.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.