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A Twitch streamer is suing the platform in a proposed class action over claims that the company trained Amazon’s AI models on streamers’ content.
Streaming platform Twitch and its parent company Amazon are facing a proposed class action lawsuit filed by a Connecticut-based streamer over claims that the companies harvested creators’ content without informing or compensating them to train Amazon’s artificial intelligence programs.
According to the filing, streamer and class representative Warren Pandiscia alleges that Amazon began scraping video streams for training purposes before Twitch updated its terms of service to address AI data use, which included an opt-out option for creators.
The alleged data collection began over two years ago, per Pandiscia’s complaint, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The filing cites a previous statement from Twitch’s former Chief Monetization Officer Mike Minton, who said video data was used in a “prototyping capacity.”
“Amazon had an overwhelming incentive to acquire training data on an unprecedented scale. Rather than negotiate for lawful licenses or seek permission, defendants accessed the Twitch streams and videos to utilize them as a massive dataset necessary to fuel Amazon’s AI products,” Pandiscia claims.
It’s unclear how much control Amazon possesses over Twitch streamers’ content, but YouTube content has been scraped extensively by nearly every major AI model creator. Meanwhile, its parent Google continues to rely extensively on content posted to the platform to train its AI models. However, there has yet to be a successful lawsuit against YouTube or Google over this practice.
Twitch streamers must also sign various agreements in exchange for access to the platform and monetization once they attain Twitch Partner status. Amazon, as its parent company, likely finds itself in that legal grey area regarding AI training that Google also inhabits.
In the AI race, Amazon has remained a step behind its biggest rivals, including Anthropic, OpenAI, and even Google. To combat this issue, the company recently updated its strategy to consolidate several smaller AI models into its new “frontier” Nova model.
Like Amazon, Google is still facing its share of lawsuits concerning access to copyrighted material used to train AI models without explicit consent or compensation. At least two such lawsuits are currently ongoing, including one that alleges the company failed to offer clear AI opt-out settings for Gmail users and another regarding copyrighted books.
The music industry has continued to fight against the harvesting of copyrighted content for AI training, with lawsuits such as Round Hill’s against Suno and Anthropic and ongoing litigation between the majors and Suno or Udio. The use of Twitch creators’ content by Amazon to train its AI models raises additional concerns, especially for DJs and other musicians who play for audiences on the streaming platform.