Twitch confirms Amazon's AI models train on livestreams

Amazon is training its AI models on Twitch livestreams. Twitch confirmed the practice Wednesday when it introduced an opt-out setting that lets creators block Amazon's model training. The announcement was the first time the company acknowledged the training was happening.

Mary Kish, Twitch's head of community, said on a livestream she expected backlash. "We don't expect you to be happy or excited about this," she said. "I don't expect anyone to react to this favorably."

The live chat during the stream filled with hundreds of anti-AI messages. Several high-profile streamers posted criticism on X, urging followers to toggle the setting off.

"EVERYONE make sure to turn this off and tell Twitch we don't want this crap!" streamer Legundo wrote on X.

Twitch chief product officer Mike Minton said he did not know whether Amazon had already used Twitch content to train models. "I don't know what Amazon in this case has done in terms of model training, and what they've used and not used," Minton said. "I'm not responsible for Amazon's training efforts."

Kish and Minton described the opt-out as a privacy feature unique to Twitch. "Almost any publicly available content is being used for model training in one form or another, whether permitted or not," Minton added.

The disclosure comes as Amazon competes with OpenAI and Anthropic in the frontier model race. Amazon bought Twitch in 2014 and has been scaling its AI infrastructure rapidly. A parallel AI Rogue Agents: Who Bears Liability for Breaches explores similar questions about data rights when models ingest user-generated content.

Minton said Twitch's own models handle caption generation, clip creation and content classification – none of them generative tasks. Users can opt out by going to their privacy settings and adjusting a slider at the bottom of the page. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.