Book publisher Chicken Soup for the Soul has sued Apple and several other tech giants, alleging they used pirated copies of its books to train artificial intelligence systems. The lawsuit, filed in California federal court, names Google, Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, Perplexity, and Elon Musk's xAI alongside Apple in the copyright infringement case.

According to the complaint, the companies downloaded pirated books from shadow-library websites including The Pile, LibGen, Z-Library, and Anna's Archive to train their large language models. The publisher claims these tech companies reproduced, parsed, and embedded the copyrighted works without permission to accelerate commercial AI development. The lawsuit specifically mentions that Apple Foundation Models relied on The Pile and Books 3 datasets.

This isn't the first time The Pile has surfaced in AI training controversies. In 2024, it was implicated in accusations about YouTube video usage. Apple previously stated that The Pile dataset was only used for research purposes and not in any models powering Apple Intelligence or machine learning features. Whether this distinction will hold up in court remains to be determined as the case proceeds.