YouTubers Are Suing Amazon, Meta, and More Over Alleged AI Video Scraping

A group of YouTubers is going after some of the biggest names in tech, alleging that companies including Amazon, Meta, Nvidia, ByteDance, Snap, and OpenAI illegally scraped millions of YouTube videos to train their AI models — without permission or compensation.

The lawsuits were filed by Ted Entertainment (the company behind h3h3Productions and the H3 Podcast), Matt Fisher of MrShortGameGolf, and Golfholics. Together, the creators represent roughly 6.2 million subscribers and more than 4 billion views on YouTube.

The most recent suit, filed April 4, 2026 in U.S. District Court in Seattle, targets Amazon. The complaint alleges Amazon used automated downloading tools paired with virtual machines that cycled through IP addresses to scrape copyrighted YouTube videos and feed them into training data for Nova Reel, its generative AI video model available through Amazon Bedrock.

The lawsuits center on several massive datasets — including Panda-70M, HD-VILA-100M, and HD-VG-130M — that catalog millions of YouTube videos. These datasets were reportedly created for academic research only. But according to the complaints, the tech companies used them commercially by downloading every referenced video directly from YouTube, bypassing the platform's security protections in the process.

Each company allegedly used the scraped content for a different AI product. The suits allege Nvidia used the videos for its Cosmos video model, Meta for its Make-a-Video tool, ByteDance for MagicVideo, Snap for its Imagine Lens feature, OpenAI for Sora, and Amazon for Nova Reel.

The plaintiffs' content alone appears hundreds of times across the datasets. But the scope of the alleged scraping goes far beyond three channels — one dataset alone reportedly draws from approximately 3.8 million YouTube videos across tens of thousands of channels. Content from major creators like MrBeast, Marques Brownlee, and PewDiePie was also reportedly included.

All of the suits make the same core legal argument: the companies violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by circumventing YouTube's anti-scraping protections to access copyrighted content. YouTube's terms of service expressly prohibit scraping, unauthorized downloading, and bulk extraction of content.

The plaintiffs are seeking class-action certification, meaning any U.S.-based YouTube creator whose videos were scraped could potentially be included. They're also seeking the maximum statutory damages allowed under the DMCA and injunctions to stop the companies from continuing to use the content.

There are no settlements in any of these cases yet. Amazon declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation.

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