Amazon and its live-streaming subsidiary Twitch are being taken to court over the company’s use of streamers’ videos to train artificial intelligence models, in a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of millions of content creators. The suit, brought by Connecticut-based streamer Warren Pandiscia, alleges that Amazon used Twitch broadcasts as AI training data without obtaining users’ permission or providing compensation, in breach of the platform’s contract with its users.
The legal challenge follows controversy that erupted in August when Twitch announced that user content would be used for AI training, giving streamers the option to opt out if they objected. The change drew backlash from the platform’s community. The lawsuit argues that streamers’ work should not be commercially exploited to develop AI systems without consent or remuneration, and it seeks damages for those whose content was allegedly used, as well as a court order barring Amazon from continuing the practice.
Twitch and Amazon have not publicly commented on the litigation. The scale of the issue is significant: streamers on the platform reportedly produced more than 215 million hours of content in the first few months of 2026 alone. However, it remains unclear exactly when Amazon began collecting Twitch user data for AI training purposes.
Twitch’s chief product officer, Mike Minton, previously acknowledged that he did not know whether user data had been scraped for training before the opt-out option was offered, saying he was uncertain about what Amazon “has done in terms of model training and what they’ve used and not used.” In its own FAQ, Twitch stated that audio from streams could be used to “refine models that create speech to text,” which would help improve automatic subtitles on Twitch and Amazon video content.
The opt-out process requires streamers to navigate to the Security and Privacy tab in their dashboard and disable the “training for Generative AI” toggle. Yet the protection is limited: it applies only to an individual’s own stream, so creators can still be swept into AI training if they appear on a channel where the setting remains enabled. Amazon, which acquired Twitch in 2014 for nearly $1 billion (£740m), has made artificial intelligence a strategic priority as it competes with Google, Meta, and other major technology firms.