Aamir Siddiqui / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Apple is facing a lawsuit from YouTubers over alleged use of videos to train its AI models.
- The creators claim Apple used their content without permission, payment, or credit.
- A dataset called Panda-70M is at the center, indexing millions of YouTube clips for AI training.
Apple’s AI plans are facing a familiar challenge as creators push back, and now they are 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 (via MacRumors). The case involves well-known channels like h3h3Productions and golf creators such as MrShortGame Golf and Golfholics. They say Apple used their videos without permission, payment, or even basic credit.
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The lawsuit says Apple did more than just link to content. It claims Apple got around YouTube’s protections to download and use videos directly. The creators argue this breaks the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bans getting past systems meant to protect copyrighted material.
The lawsuit also says Apple made significant profits by using creators’ content to build its AI system, without giving anything back to the people who made 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 URLs, timestamps, and identifiers. To use these clips, someone would have to access and extract each one from YouTube.
The plaintiffs say that accessing these clips means getting around YouTube’s safeguards, making each clip a separate act of scraping. They also claim their own videos appear hundreds of times in the dataset.
Apple has not explained in detail how it handled the data, but its research papers confirm that YouTube videos were used in its AI training process. At this point, the lawsuit is asking for damages and possibly an injunction.
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