Apple is facing a lawsuit from three YouTube channels that claim the company used their videos without permission to train its AI models. The lawsuit, reported by MacRumors, includes popular channels like h3h3Productions and golf creators MrShortGame Golf and Golfholics.
The creators say Apple didn’t ask for permission, offer payment, or give proper credit for using their videos. They also allege that Apple bypassed YouTube’s protections to directly download and use the content, which they argue violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The lawsuit claims Apple earned significant profits by using these videos to develop its AI system while giving nothing back to the creators. It highlights a dataset called Panda-70M, mentioned in Apple’s 2025 research paper on video-generation AI. This dataset contains thousands of YouTube clips organized by URLs, timestamps, and identifiers. Accessing these clips would require bypassing YouTube’s safeguards, which the creators say amounts to repeated acts of scraping their content.
The lawsuit is seeking damages and possibly an injunction. The case has drawn attention to how major tech companies gather online content for AI training, especially when creators are not informed or compensated. Apple has not yet explained how it collected or used these videos.
