US senators urge ByteDance to shut down Seedance 2.0 over copyright and deepfake concerns

ByteDance is under new pressure in the United States after two senators told the company to shut down Seedance 2.0 “immediately.”

Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Senator Peter Welch of Vermont said the new AI video model creates clips using real people and well-known characters and raises serious copyright and intellectual property issues.

They sent the demand to ByteDance chief executive Liang Rubo as the company was already dealing with growing anger from Hollywood and legal risk tied to the tool’s output.

The fight centers on what Seedance 2.0 can do and how fast it spreads after launch. ByteDance, best known as TikTok’s parent company and now a minority shareholder in TikTok’s U.S. spinoff, released the model in China in February.

Soon after that, short AI-made videos flooded social media. Some allegedly showed fake scenes involving major stars and blockbuster franchises.

Senators tell ByteDance to shut the product down

In their letter, Senators Marsha and Peter wrote, “Seedance 2.0 is the most glaring example of copyright infringement from a ByteDance product to date, and you must immediately shut down Seedance and implement meaningful safeguards to prevent further infringing outputs.”

They said the model infringed “the copyrighted materials of both American and global innovators” and accused ByteDance of releasing it without licenses for training material and without tools strong enough to block unlawful output.

They listed what users made within the first 24 hours after the model went live on February 12. Social media users created a fake brawl between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.

They rewrote the ending of Stranger Things. They staged a battle between Thanos and Superman on Mars. Marsha and Peter said these were not small experiments buried on obscure accounts. They said the clips went viral, pulled in millions of views, and openly celebrated the theft of American creative work.

The senators also pointed to one post comparing a clip from the film F1 with a nearly identical version generated by Seedance 2.0. The post claimed the model recreated the movie’s most expensive shot for nine cents.

Their letter said responsible global companies follow the law and respect intellectual property rights and personal likeness protections. Marsha and Peter argued that ByteDance had shown a willingness to violate U.S. federal law and profit from the work of American creators.

They also cited Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution, saying creators have broad and exclusive rights over how their work is used.

Hollywood sends legal warnings as ByteDance delays expansion

The pushback was not limited to Capitol Hill. Hollywood reacted quickly after the videos spread online. Studios then sent ByteDance a flood of cease-and-desist letters.

Disney’s lawyers accused the company of a “virtual smash-and-grab of Disney’s IP.” ByteDance answered by saying it would add stronger safeguards for intellectual property.

That did not stop the product from running into more trouble. Marsha and Peter said Seedance 2.0 poses a direct threat to the U.S. intellectual property system, the constitutional rights of creators, and the income of the creative community.

They wrote that the release had already been denounced by creative industry groups and experts and now faced major litigation risk because of what they called industrial-scale copyright infringement and deepfake abuse.

The senators also tied the case to so-called general U.S. concerns about China, saying the country has a long record of copyright abuse, domestic digital piracy, and infringing export goods.

They noted that the Trump administration placed China on its latest Priority Watch List, citing longstanding issues that included technology transfer, trade secrets, counterfeiting, online piracy, copyright law, patent and related policies, bad-faith trademarks, and geographical indications.

They said bringing Seedance 2.0 into American markets without real copyright protection showed that ByteDance and the Chinese government were unwilling to comply with U.S. law.

Marsha and Peter also rejected the company’s recent promises to strengthen safeguards, calling them a delay tactic that would let ByteDance keep abusing innovators and keep making money from their success.

Their letter ended with a demand that the company shut down Seedance 2.0 and remove unlicensed intellectual property from its data holdings.

ByteDance builds AI capacity outside China with Nvidia chips

While all of that was happening, ByteDance slowed its global rollout of the product. The company had planned to launch Seedance 2.0 worldwide in mid-March, but those plans were paused as engineers and lawyers tried to avoid more legal trouble.

At the same time, ByteDance kept spending heavily on infrastructure for its wider AI push. The company is working with Southeast Asian cloud firm Aolani Cloud on plans to use about 500 Nvidia Blackwell computing systems in Malaysia.

Those systems would include roughly 36,000 B200 chips. Aolani is buying servers from Aivres, which assembles servers using Nvidia chips.

If the full arrangement is completed, the hardware would likely cost more than $2.5 billion. An Aolani spokesman said the company is currently operating with about $100 million in hardware.

An Nvidia spokesman said export rules, by design, allow cloud infrastructure to be built and operated outside controlled countries such as China, and he said the company’s compliance team cleared all cloud partners before any direct or indirect chip sales.

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