Apple sued over alleged youtube video scraping for ai training

Apple is facing a proposed class action lawsuit accusing the tech giant of scraping millions of YouTube videos to train an AI model, a move that raises privacy concerns given its emphasis on user privacy.

Three youtube creators claim apple bypassed youtube's anti-scraping protections.

The lawsuit, filed by three YouTube channels - Ted Entertainment, Matt Fisher, and Golfholics - alleges that Apple downloaded millions of videos without permission to train a video generation AI model described in a research paper published in 2024.

The plaintiffs claim their content appears over 500 times in the dataset and want to represent all creators in a similar situation.

Apple isn't alone in this, as Amazon and OpenAI face nearly identical suits over the same dataset, highlighting an industry-wide pattern of tech companies treating creator content as free AI fuel.

Apple's involvement is especially awkward given its history of struggling to catch up in the AI race, with delayed features, broken promises, and even shareholder lawsuits. Its leadership has admitted the company was late to AI, and top AI researchers have left for competitors.

With privacy as its brand, Apple's alleged data scraping lands harder than it would for other companies.