Apple’s AI initiatives are encountering a familiar obstacle as content creators push back, and now the situation is escalating to the courtroom. Three YouTube channels have filed a lawsuit against Apple, alleging that the company secretly collected their videos to train its AI models, as reported by MacRumors.
The channels involved include popular ones like h3h3Productions, as well as golf creators such as MrShortGame Golf and Golfholics. They claim that Apple used their videos without obtaining permission, offering payment, or even providing proper credit.
The lawsuit states that Apple went beyond merely linking to the content. It alleges that the company circumvented YouTube’s protections to directly download and utilize the videos.
The creators argue that this violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which prohibits bypassing systems designed to protect copyrighted material.
The lawsuit alleges that Apple made hefty profits by using creators’ content to build its AI system. It also argues that Apple didn’t give anything back to the people who made the videos.
The lawsuit brings attention to a dataset known as Panda-70M, which was referenced by Apple researchers in a paper on video-generation AI published in 2025. Panda-70M is a comprehensive index of YouTube clips, organized by URLs, timestamps, and identifiers. To utilize these clips, an individual would need to access and extract each one from YouTube.
The complainants voiced that accessing these clips means getting around YouTube’s safeguards, making each clip a different act of scraping. They also claim their own videos appear hundreds of times in the dataset.
The lawsuit is currently seeking damages and potentially an injunction, arising from the confirmation in Apple’s research papers that YouTube videos were utilized in its AI training. However, Apple has not yet provided a detailed explanation of how it managed this data.
