A group of prominent YouTubers suing major tech companies over the alleged unauthorized use of their videos to train artificial intelligence models has now added Snap to its growing list of defendants. The creators claim Snap trained its AI systems on their YouTube content without permission, using the material to power features such as the app’s Imagine Lens, which allows users to generate and edit images through text prompts.
The plaintiffs, who collectively command about 6.2 million subscribers across three YouTube channels, had previously filed similar lawsuits against Nvidia, Meta, and ByteDance. In the newly filed proposed class action suit, submitted on Friday to the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, they accuse Snap of relying on large scale video language datasets such as HD VILA 100M, which they say were created strictly for academic and research use, not commercial deployment.
According to the filing, the creators allege that Snap bypassed YouTube’s technological safeguards, terms of service, and licensing restrictions to access and use their videos. Those rules explicitly prohibit commercial exploitation of content without authorization. The lawsuit is seeking statutory damages as well as a permanent injunction to prevent what it describes as ongoing copyright infringement.
The case is being spearheaded by the creators behind the popular h3h3 YouTube channel, which has more than 5.5 million subscribers, alongside smaller channels MrShortGame Golf and Golfholics. Together, they argue their content was used to enrich AI systems without compensation, consent, or credit.
The Snap lawsuit is part of a rapidly expanding wave of legal battles between content creators and AI developers. These disputes now span publishers, authors, artists, news organizations, and user generated content platforms. The nonprofit Copyright Alliance estimates that more than 70 copyright infringement cases have already been filed against AI companies.
Outcomes so far have been mixed. In some instances, judges have sided with tech firms, as seen in a recent case involving Meta and a group of authors. In others, such as Anthropic’s dispute with authors, companies have opted to settle and pay compensation. Many of the cases, including this one, remain unresolved, signaling that the legal rules governing AI training and copyrighted content are far from settled.