Aamir Siddiqui/Android Authority
TL;DR
- Apple is facing a lawsuit from YouTubers over the alleged use of videos to train its AI models.
- The creators claim that Apple used their content without permission, payment, or credit.
- At the center is a dataset called Panda-70M, which indexes millions of YouTube clips for AI training.
Apple’s AI plans are facing a familiar challenge as manufacturers have pushed back, and now they’re taking the issue to court.
Three YouTube channels have sued Apple, claiming the company secretly collected videos from the platform to train its AI models macrumors). This case includes well-known channels like h3h3Productions and golf creators like MrShortGameGolf and Golfaholics. He says Apple used his videos without permission, payment or even basic credit.
Don’t want to miss the best of Android Authority?
trial Says Apple did more than just link content. It claims that Apple has got YouTube’s protection for downloading and using videos directly. The creators argue that it breaks the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bans previous systems created to protect copyrighted material.
The lawsuit also says Apple made significant profits by using creators’ content to build its AI systems, without returning anything back to the people who created the videos.
The lawsuit highlights a dataset called Panda-70M, which Apple researchers mentioned in a 2025 paper On video-generation AI. Panda-70M is a large index of YouTube clips, segmented and organized by URL, timestamp, and identifiers. To use these clips, one must access and extract each clip from YouTube.
The plaintiffs say that accessing these clips meant bypassing YouTube’s security measures, creating a separate task of scraping each clip. They also claim that their own videos appear hundreds of times in the dataset.
Apple hasn’t detailed how it handled the data, but its research paper confirms that YouTube videos were used in its AI training process. At this point, the lawsuit is seeking damages and possibly an injunction.
Thank you for being a part of our community. Please read our comment policy before posting.
