JAKARTA – Apple is facing a serious lawsuit in the United States after being accused of using YouTube videos without permission to train artificial intelligence (AI) models.
The lawsuit was filed in California federal court on April 3, 2026, alleging violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). A number of YouTube content creators are principal parties to this class action lawsuit, including Ted Entertainment, which controls the h3h3Productions channel.
In addition to Ted Entertainment, two other channels also joined the lawsuit, namely MrShortGameGolf and Golfholics. They accused Apple of systematically downloading and archiving videos using methods that allegedly violated platform protection systems.
According to court documents, Apple allegedly used scraping techniques that constantly changed IP addresses to avoid detection, and collected that data into large datasets used to train Apple AI Video models.
In evidence, the plaintiffs refer to a dataset called Panda-70M, which is said to be composed entirely of scraped YouTube videos. The dataset records the use of hundreds of videos belonging to the plaintiff, including 438 videos from the Ted Entertainment channel.
Plaintiffs believe this action constitutes serious copyright infringement and an “attack on the content creator community” whose works are used without charge.
“This is an unacceptable attack on creators, whose content is used without their permission to power the $1 trillion AI industry,” the complaint says.
In addition to seeking maximum compensation, the plaintiffs also asked the court to issue an injunction to prevent Apple from using the illegally obtained data in the future, as well as additional damages and legal costs.
The case joins a long list of legal disputes related to AI training based on public data. Previously, companies such as Meta, Nvidia, and ByteDance faced similar charges.
Ironically, Apple has long been known for trying to take a more “ethical” approach to AI development, including considering licensing content from publishers like Condé Nast and NBC News. But this case shows that even the biggest companies have trouble avoiding controversy when it comes to competing for data used to train AI models.
The lawsuit also comes just weeks after Apple was embroiled in another lawsuit over its use of “The Pile” dataset, which allegedly contained copyrighted material collected without permission.
As legal pressure increases from creators and content owners, the outcome of this case could set an important precedent for determining legal limits on data use in future AI training.
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