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YouTubers sue Apple over unauthorized AI training

Written by Petteri Pyyny @ 07 Apr 2026 4:16

YouTubers sue Apple over unauthorized AI training

Three well-known American YouTubers have sued Apple, accusing the company of unauthorized use of their own videos for training Apple's AI models. The lawsuit was filed by h3h3 Productions, MrShortGameGolf, and Golfholics.
The creators who filed the lawsuit want the court to handle the case as a class action lawsuit, meaning other content creators on YouTube whose videos Apple has (allegedly) used as training material for its AI models could join.

According to MacRumors, the content creators accuse Apple of violating the U.S. DMCA law. According to the creators, Apple illegally collected (scraped) millions upon millions of YouTube videos, which it then used to train its AI. Based on court documents, Apple collected data from the so-called Panda-70M dataset, which contains links to videos, their subtitles, and verbal descriptions of each video's content.



Apple published an AI research paper (Scalable Text and Image Conditioned Video Generation) in late 2024, where the Panda-70M dataset was used to train a video generation model. According to the content creators (PDF), their created content appears in the said material over 500 times. Although the research description states that only video links were used, the content creators believe that instead of just links, Apple would have downloaded the videos and utilized the content of the videos themselves - which in turn violates both YouTube's terms of service and U.S. copyright laws.

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