YouTubers Sue Snap For Alleged Copyright Infringement In Training Its AI Models
YouTubers sue Snap alleging unauthorized use of videos to train AI models like Imagine Lens. Creators demand accountability for commercial AI training
Matilda
YouTubers Sue Snap For Alleged Copyright Infringement In Training Its AI Models
YouTubers Sue Snap Over AI Training Copyright Claims A coalition of YouTube creators has filed a proposed class action lawsuit against Snap, alleging the company illegally scraped their videos to train AI systems powering features like Snapchat's Imagine Lens. The plaintiffs—channels with 6.2 million combined subscribers including the prominent h3h3 channel—claim Snap bypassed YouTube's terms of service and used research-only datasets for commercial AI development. Filed January 24, 2026 in California federal court, the suit seeks statutory damages and a permanent injunction to halt the alleged infringement immediately. Credit: Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg / Getty Images The Core Allegation: Commercial Use of Research-Only Data At the heart of the lawsuit sits a technical but critical accusation: Snap allegedly leveraged HD-VILA-100M, a massive video-language dataset containing millions of YouTube clips originally compiled by Microsoft Research Asia strictly for academic purposes. Acc…