ByteDance’s Controversial AI Video Mannequin Reportedly on Maintain Globally Because of Copyright Disputes

In the event you’ve been ready anxiously to check out ByteDance’s new video mannequin Seedance 2.0, however you don’t have the required stipulations—a cellphone quantity with the +86 nation code and an account on a Chinese language ByteDance platform—it appears to be like such as you’ll simply need to maintain ready.

In line with two anonymous leakers who spoke to the Information, the worldwide launch of Seedance 2.0 is on maintain amid authorized motion from film studios and streaming companies.

When it was initially launched, Seedance 2.0 appeared to have few if any protections in place to stop customers from producing movies showing to star celebrities, copyrighted characters, and celebrities as copyrighted characters.

As I noted last month, this mannequin is simply the newest of many to set off copyright disputes that solely appear to assist them make a splash—this time most prominently from Disney, which has a content partnership with ByteDance competitor OpenAI.

Each new generative mannequin that goes viral appears to have a very eyebrow-raising use case, such because the Ghibli memes that adopted the discharge of OpenAI’s GPT-4o. Within the case of Seedance 2.0, that use case has largely been John Wick-style action scenes that maintain along with C-minus physics and continuity (as an alternative of the F-minus physics and continuity we’ve come to expect).

In a single well-known occasion, an X person posted a Seedance 2.0 video that appeared to point out a knock-down-drag out between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. Another clip with Cruise and Pitt turned the battle right into a Jeffrey Epstein reference, and was notable for drawing consideration to the mannequin’s shaky grasp on movie star voice mimicry.

This was a 2 line immediate in seedance 2. If the hollywood is cooked guys are proper perhaps the hollywood is cooked guys are cooked too idk. pic.twitter.com/dNTyLUIwAV

— Ruairi Robinson (@RuairiRobinson) February 11, 2026

Deadpool author Rhett Reese stated, according to the New York Times, “For all of us who work within the trade and devoted our careers and lives to it, I simply assume it’s nothing wanting terrifying,” including, “I might simply see it costing jobs far and wide.”

A little bit over per week in the past, a Reddit account associated with the AI cloud company Atlas Cloud supplied what it claimed was some element straight from ByteDance concerning the public availability of Seedance 2.0. The discharge was meant to be “earlier than mid-March, however no confirmed date but.” And that account famous the identical factor because the Data: that the ByteDance crew is “nonetheless finalizing content material restriction and copyright compliance work, so the timeline is dependent upon that.”

Gizmodo reached out to ByteDance for an announcement, and can replace if we hear again.