Three Tech Companies Sued for Using YouTube Videos to Train AI Models

Recently, three YouTube channels filed a class action lawsuit against Apple, OpenAI, and Amazon, accusing them of bypassing YouTube's anti-scraping measures to download millions of videos for AI model training. The lawsuit claims these companies used the Panda-70M dataset, which locates YouTube video clips via links—each clip extraction counts as an evasion.

The plaintiffs state their content appears over 500 times in the dataset. They request the court to certify the class action, and seek statutory damages, injunctive relief, and litigation costs under U.S. copyright law. Additionally, they ask the court to issue injunctions to stop the defendants from continuing to infringe on the copyrighted content in question.