In a significant expansion of the legal battle over AI training data, a coalition of prominent YouTubers filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Snap Inc. on Friday, January 23, 2026.
The lawsuit, lodged in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, alleges that Snapchat illegally scraped and used copyrighted video content to train its generative AI models without permission or compensation.
1. The Plaintiffs: A 6.2 Million Subscriber Coalition
The legal challenge is spearheaded by some of the most recognizable names on YouTube, representing a combined audience of over 6.2 million subscribers.
- h3h3 Productions: Led by Ethan and Hila Klein (5.52 million subscribers).
- MrShortGame Golf: A leading sports and instructional channel.
- Golfholics: A popular lifestyle and travel golf channel.
This same group has previously filed similar lawsuits against other tech giants, including Nvidia, Meta, and ByteDance, as part of a broader campaign to protect creator intellectual property from “unlicensed ingestion” by AI firms.
2. The Core Allegation: “Academic Laundering”
The lawsuit centers on Snap’s alleged use of the HD-VILA-100M dataset—a massive collection of 100 million high-definition video-language pairs sourced primarily from YouTube.
- Research vs. Commercial: The plaintiffs argue that while the dataset was created for academic and research purposes, Snap repurposed it for commercial AI development.
- Bypassing Safeguards: The complaint alleges that Snap “sidestepped” YouTube’s technical protections and Terms of Service (ToS), which strictly prohibit automated scraping and the commercial reuse of content without authorization.
- Monetization: The creators claim their videos helped teach Snap’s AI how to recognize visual patterns and generate edits, yet the revenue from these features (like Snapchat+ subscriptions) is not shared with the original creators.
3. Affected Features: The “Imagine Lens”
The primary product highlighted in the complaint is Snapchat’s “Imagine Lens.”
- Functionality: This feature allows users to transform or stylize their photos and videos using text-based prompts (e.g., “Make me look like a 1920s jazz singer”).
- The Claim: The YouTubers argue that the hyper-realistic performance of these lenses is only possible because the underlying model was trained on their high-quality, professional video archives.
4. Damages and Demands
The creators are seeking a combination of financial penalties and operational changes:
- Statutory Damages: For registered works, this can reach up to $150,000 per work for “willful infringement.”
- Permanent Injunction: A court order to stop Snap from using their content in any future AI training.
- Retraining Orders: The plaintiffs may seek “algorithmic disgorgement”—essentially forcing Snap to delete models built on the allegedly infringing data.
Conclusion: A Pivotal Year for Fair Use
This case is one of over 70 AI-related copyright lawsuits currently making their way through U.S. courts in 2026. While Snap and other tech firms argue that AI training constitutes “Fair Use” (transforming data into a new utility), creators are increasingly pushing for a licensing regime. With the Supreme Court expected to weigh in on AI training ethics later this year, the outcome of the YouTubers v. Snap case will help define whether “publicly available” data is truly “free” for AI companies to use.
