Adobe is facing a proposed class-action lawsuit accusing it of misusing copyrighted books to train an artificial intelligence model. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Elizabeth Lyon, an Oregon-based author, who alleges that Adobe used pirated versions of her books and others to train its SlimLM language model. Adobe has promoted SlimLM as a small language model designed for document assistance tasks on mobile devices and says it was pre-trained on SlimPajama-627B, an open-source dataset released in June 2023. However, the complaint claims Lyon’s works were included without permission in the data used to build the model.
According to the lawsuit, SlimPajama was derived from the RedPajama dataset, which allegedly incorporated the Books3 dataset, a collection of about 191,000 copyrighted books. “The SlimPajama dataset was created by copying and manipulating the RedPajama dataset, including copying Books3,” the filing states, adding that it contains “the copyrighted works of Plaintiff and the Class members.” Books3 and RedPajama have been cited in multiple lawsuits across the tech sector. Recent cases have targeted Apple, Salesforce, and Anthropic, the latter agreeing in September 2025 to pay $1.5 billion to authors over similar claims. The Adobe case reflects ongoing legal pressure on AI developers over training data practices.
