After Nvidia, Meta, and ByteDance, the social media giant Snap has also been caught in the legal storm of AI copyright infringement. On January 26, 2026, a group of well-known YouTubers with millions of followers formally filed a class-action lawsuit with the United States District Court for the Central District of California, accusing Snap of illegally scraping their video content to train AI models without permission.

Core Allegation: "Commercial Theft" Crossing the Boundary of Research

The plaintiff team is led by the h3h3 channel, which has 5.52 million subscribers, and includes the creative power of approximately 6.2 million subscribers.

Illegally Scraped Video Data: The complaint states that Snap used a large-scale video-language dataset called HD-VILA-100M to train its AI features, such as Imagine Lens (which allows users to edit images using text prompts).

Bypassing Technical Restrictions: The plaintiffs claim that datasets like HD-VILA-100M were originally limited to academic and research use, but Snap used them for commercial purposes, bypassing YouTube's technical restrictions, terms of service, and copyright licensing agreements.

Claims and Demands: The lawsuit seeks statutory damages and requests the court to issue a permanent injunction to stop Snap from committing future copyright violations.

Creators vs AI Giants: A Wave of Litigation Has Surpassed 70 Cases

This is not the first time Snap has faced such pressure. According to the Copyright Alliance, there have been more than 70 copyright infringement lawsuits against AI companies globally, with plaintiffs including publishers, authors, artists, and newspapers across multiple fields.

Industry Precedent: Previously, Anthropic chose to settle by paying compensation to authors, while some lawsuits against Meta ended with judges supporting the tech giants.

Escalating Advocacy: The involvement of YouTubers marks a new wave of advocacy by video creators, who are no longer willing to let platforms use their original work as free "training fuel."

Additional News: Meta Launches "Premium Subscription" Test

While Snap is mired in litigation, Meta is accelerating its commercial transformation. It has been revealed that Meta plans to test a new premium subscription service on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp.

Exclusive Features: The new subscription will unlock advanced AI creation capabilities, unlimited audience lists, and features such as "stealth view for Stories," which are highly attractive.

Competition Benchmark: This move clearly reflects the success of Snapchat+ — a service that now has over 16 million subscribers and has become one of its core revenue sources.