Three YouTube creators, including the team behind h3h3Productions, have filed a lawsuit against Apple, accusing the company of illegally pulling videos from YouTube to train its artificial intelligence systems.
The civil suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for California’s Northern District by the owners of three channels: h3h3Productions (widely recognized for the H3 Podcast), MrShortGame Golf, and Golfholics. According to the complaint, Apple allegedly bypassed YouTube’s copyright protection measures and violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in order to collect videos not just from these creators, but from millions of channels across the platform.
At the heart of the case is the claim that Apple used the scraped videos to support AI training efforts. The lawsuit points to a peer-reviewed academic paper written by Apple researchers that discusses training “Apple AI Video” using Panda-70M, a dataset described as containing around 70 million videos. The creators argue that some of their copyrighted video content is included in that dataset.
The complaint also alleges Apple relied on automated video-downloading tools—essentially video scrapers—to download content from YouTube while evading the platform’s normal safeguards. The creators say this allowed Apple to benefit financially from their work without permission, credit, or compensation.
In addition to seeking monetary damages, the plaintiffs are asking the court for an injunction that would stop Apple from scraping YouTube videos going forward. If granted, that order could limit Apple’s ability to use YouTube as a source of training data for future AI models.
The case adds to the growing legal debate over how major tech companies collect and use online content for AI training—and whether creators should have more control, transparency, and compensation when their work is used to build commercial AI systems.
