A group of prominent YouTube creators has expanded its legal action over alleged AI training practices, adding Snap as a defendant in a proposed class action filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The plaintiffs, whose channels collectively reach more than 6.2 million subscribers, allege that Snap trained AI systems on their videos without permission for features such as the Imagine Lens.
The lawsuit claims Snap relied on large-scale video-language datasets, including HD-VILA-100M, intended for academic research, and bypassed YouTube’s technical and licensing restrictions to use the content commercially. The creators previously brought similar claims against Nvidia, Meta, and ByteDance. The plaintiffs are seeking statutory damages and a permanent injunction as part of a widening wave of creator-led AI copyright litigation.
