Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
YouTube is rolling out a way for creators to let third-party companies use their videos to train AI models. To be clear, the default setting for this is off, meaning that if you don’t want to let third-party companies scrape your videos for AI training, you don’t have to do anything. But if, for some reason, you do want to allow that — Google says that “some creators and rights holders” may want to — it’s going to be an option.
“We see this as an important first step in supporting creators and helping them realize new value for their YouTube content in the AI era,” a TeamYouTube staffer named Rob says in a support post. “As we gather feedback, we’ll continue to explore features that facilitate new forms of collaboration between creators and third-party companies, including options for authorized methods to access content.”
YouTube will be rolling out the setting in YouTube Studio “over the next few days,” and unauthorized scraping “remains prohibited,” Rob writes.
Another support page says that you’ll be able to pick and choose from a list of third-party companies that can train on your videos or you can simply allow all third-party companies to train on them. The initial list of companies includes the following, according to TechCrunch:
AI21 Labs, Adobe, Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, ByteDance, Cohere, IBM, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, OpenAI, Perplexity, Pika Labs, Runway, Stability AI, and xAI.
YouTube spokesperson Jack Malon tells The Verge that TechCrunch’s list is accurate. “These companies were chosen because they’re building generative AI models and are likely sensible choices for a potential partnership with creators,” Malon says.
This announcement follows reports of AI models from big companies — including OpenAI, Apple, and Anthropic — being trained on content and datasets scraped from YouTube. Google itself already uses YouTube data to help train its AI tools. “As we have for many years, we use content uploaded to YouTube to improve the product experience for creators and viewers across YouTube and Google, including through machine learning and AI applications,” the company said in September, when it announced this feature was in the works. “We do this consistent with the terms that creators agree to.”
