Snap Inc. Faces Class Action Lawsuit over Allegedly Scraping Millions of YouTube Videos to Train its AI

Snap, Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, is facing a proposed class action lawsuit filed on January 23, 2026, accusing the social media giant of illegally downloading millions of YouTube videos to train its generative AI model, bypassing the platform’s own protective measures and violating creators’ intellectual property rights. The case, captioned Ted Entertainment Inc. et al. v. Snap Inc. (Case No. 2:26 cv 00754), was filed in California under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

How the Scraping Allegedly Worked

According to the 22 page lawsuit, Snap used backend automated tools to fraudulently download the visual and audio files of millions of YouTube videos through a process known as scraping. The complaint alleges Snap specifically accessed two large AI training datasets called HD VILA 100M and Panda 70M, which contain detailed information about millions of YouTube videos.

To avoid detection, Snap allegedly used video downloading programs and virtual machines…

that rotated IP addresses to circumvent YouTube‘s technological protection measures. The lawsuit argues this goes far beyond the “ordinary” use of a site visitor, constituting a deliberate and systematic effort to extract data at scale.

YouTube’s Terms Were Allegedly Ignored YouTube‘s Terms of Service explicitly prohibit scraping, unauthorized downloading, bulk extraction, and other forms of data mining of audiovisual content, except through expressly permitted features or licensed application programming interfaces.

The complaint argues that these contractual restrictions operate alongside the platform’s technical safeguards to prevent exactly the kind of access Snap is alleged to have carried out, regardless of whether the videos in question are formally copyright registered.

“[Snap]’s actions were not only unlawful, but an unconscionable attack on the community of content creators whose content is used to fuel the multi trillion dollar generative AI industry without any compensation,” the lawsuit states…

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Snap Inc. Faces Class Action Lawsuit over Allegedly Scraping Millions of YouTube Videos to Train its AI

Snap, Inc., the parent company of Snapchat, is facing a proposed class action lawsuit filed on January 23, 2026, accusing the social media giant of illegally

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