Amazon and Twitch Sued for Training AI Models on Streamer Content Without Consent
A Connecticut livestreamer has filed a class-action lawsuit alleging Amazon used creators' video footage as free data to train commercial AI systems.
Amazon and its live-streaming subsidiary Twitch are facing a new class-action lawsuit over allegations that the companies harvested content from creators without permission to train artificial intelligence models.
The complaint was brought by Warren Pandiscia, a Connecticut-based streamer, as first reported by Courthouse News and noted by Engadget. According to the court filing, the platforms utilized broadcast video footage and recorded channel archives to build training datasets for Amazon's generative AI systems without securing licenses or explicit consent from creators.
The lawsuit claims Amazon and Twitch breached their contractual obligations with platform creators by treating broadcast footage as complimentary raw material to develop separate commercial software applications.
In the complaint, the plaintiff asserts that the technology companies derived financial benefits from the practice while creators suffered monetary or property losses as a result of what the filing characterizes as unfair and deceptive business practices.
The legal challenge follows recent controversy surrounding Twitch's data management policies. Earlier this month, Twitch Support announced on X that it had introduced a setting allowing creators to manually opt out of having channel content used for generative AI model training across Amazon.
During a subsequent live broadcast of Twitch's "Patch Notes" show, Chief Product Officer Mike Minton addressed a viewer question regarding why the feature was enabled by default rather than requiring creators to opt in. Minton acknowledged the decision on stream, stating that "if it was opt-in, nobody would opt in."
The dispute highlights growing legal friction across the technology sector over how major computing platforms harvest creator media to train large-scale generative models.
Similar legal actions have targeted other major tech firms in recent months. Earlier this year, three content creators on YouTube launched a class-action suit against Apple, accusing the company of scraping copyrighted video content to train its own proprietary AI systems.
Sources
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