IP Law Daily, AI NEWS—N.D. Cal.: Shareholder lawsuit claims Apple leadership pushed illegal AI copyright infringement, privacy violations, (Aug 21, 2026)
Law Firms Mentioned:Bottini & Bottini, Inc.
Organizations Mentioned:Apple Inc.
The complaint alleges that Apple illegally trained its AI models on millions of copyrighted YouTube videos as well as pirated books and voice recordings.
A new Apple shareholder complaint alleges that CEO Tim Cook and other officers and directors implemented an illegal plan to use pirated datasets to develop Apple’s AI services, triggering multiple lawsuits alleging copyright violations. The complaint asserts that the defendants breached their fiduciary duties by pursuing illegal conduct exposing Apple to legal risk (Rosen v. Cook, No. 5:26-cv-08463-EJD (N.D. Cal. Aug. 14, 2026)).
The lawsuit joins a new wave of shareholder derivative suits alleging AI-related copyright infringement and seeks damages on Apple’s behalf along with corporate governance reforms.
Parties. The plaintiff, a current Apple stockholder, is suing seven officer defendants and eight director defendants. Tim Cook is currently both CEO and a director but is set to step down as CEO and transition to executive chairman on September 1.
Jurisdiction. The complaint is filed in federal district court in the Northern District of California.
Facts. The complaint alleges that the defendants oversaw broad violations of copyright law and the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) in the training of Apple’s AI products, including Large Language Models (LLMs), Vision Language Models (VLMs) and Commercial Voice Models (CVMs).
“Rather than utilize a clean dataset that did not include copyrighted works and commercial voices, Defendants followed the ‘ask forgiveness not approval’ model and adopted and implemented an unlawful plan to use pirated datasets to develop the Company’s AI services,” the complaint stated.
According to the complaint, the defendants were ‘well aware’ of the issues with Apple’s downloading, copying, storing, and using copyright holders’ works, YouTube videos, and commercialized voiceprints without permission or compensation.
The defendants were also allegedly aware of potential liability for this conduct, which triggered multiple lawsuits against Apple by copyright holders and commercial voice actors based on Apple’s failure to compensate them for downloading, copying, storing, or using their copyrighted works and voiceprints.
The allegations include that Apple:
Trained LLMs using the Books3 pirated dataset, which included approximately 196,640 pirated books, and Applebot web pages containing copyrighted works from commercial news and media websites;
Trained VLMs using Panda-70M, a derivative dataset allegedly compiled from 3,098,462 YouTube videos consisting of approximately 70.8 million video clips, extracted without authorization from YouTube or the copyright holders.
Trained multiple CVMs using thousands of hours of human speech recordings and extracted the unique biometric signatures and the voiceprints of the speakers from those recordings. The defendants allegedly violated BIPA by failing to identify the source speakers, provide written notice of the specific purpose and duration of collection, or obtain a written release from each speaker before ingesting a recording into the training pipeline.
“Apple is now saddled with having to defend itself in copyright infringement and BIPA violation cases as a result of Defendants’ misconduct and is facing potentially massive liability and related costs and reputational damages, as well as potential loss of customers and/or claims from Apple customers who unwittingly used the copyright and BIPA infringing Apple services,” the complaint stated.
Claims. The complaint asserts that the defendants breached their fiduciary duties of loyalty and acted in bad faith by either negligently or recklessly causing Apple to engage in the AI-related conduct. Apple was allegedly damaged through exposure to “potentially massive liability” from copyright and BIPA class actions, as well as loss of goodwill, reputational damage, and lost customers.
The complaint also claims that the director defendants wasted corporate assets and violated SEC Rule 14a-9 under Section 14(a) of the Exchange Act by causing misleading statements to be issued to stockholders in proxy statements.
The complaint states that pre-suit demand would be futile and is therefore excused.
Relief requested. The complaint seeks declaratory relief, damages, restitution, disgorgement, and an order directing Apple and the defendants to reform corporate governance and internal procedures to comply with applicable laws.
This is case No. 5:26-cv-08463-EJD.
Attorneys: David Todd Wissbroecker (Bottini & Bottini, Inc.) for Phil Rosen.
Companies: Apple Inc.
News: AINews Copyright TechnologyInternet CaliforniaNews