Sept 5 (Reuters) - Technology giant Apple ( AAPL ) was

accused by authors in a lawsuit on Friday of illegally using

their copyrighted books to help train its artificial

intelligence systems, part of an expanding legal fight over

protections for intellectual property in the AI era.

The proposed class action, filed in the federal court in

Northern California, said Apple ( AAPL ) copied protected works without

consent and without credit or compensation.

"Apple ( AAPL ) has not attempted to pay these authors for their

contributions to this potentially lucrative venture," according

to the lawsuit, filed by authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer

Roberson.

Apple ( AAPL ) and lawyers for the plaintiffs did not immediately

respond to requests for comment on Friday.

The lawsuit is the latest in a wave of cases from authors,

news outlets and others accusing major technology companies of

violating legal protections for their works.

Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic on Friday

disclosed in a court filing in California that it agreed to pay

$1.5 billion to settle a class action from a group of authors

who accused the company of using their books to train its AI

chatbot Claude without permission.

Anthropic did not admit any liability in the accord, which

lawyers for the plaintiffs called the largest publicly reported

copyright recovery in history.

In June, Microsoft ( MSFT ) was hit with a lawsuit by a

group of authors who claimed the company used their books

without permission to train its Megatron artificial intelligence

model. Meta Platforms ( META ) and Microsoft ( MSFT )-backed

OpenAI also have faced claims over the alleged misuse of

copyrighted material in AI training.

The lawsuit against Apple ( AAPL ) accused the company of using a

known body of pirated books to train its "OpenELM" large

language models.

Hendrix, who lives in New York, and Roberson in Arizona,

said their works were part of the pirated dataset, according to

the lawsuit.