March 19, 2026
U.S. Sens. Peter Welch (D-Vermont) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote a letter to China’s ByteDance advocating for the shutdown of the company’s “Seedance 2.0” artificial intelligence-generated model platform because it violates the copyrights of innovators in the United States and around the world.
In a letter to ByteDance CEO Liang Lubo, Welch and Blackburn highlighted how AI platforms facilitate the theft of U.S. creative works and called on the company to implement meaningful safeguards to prevent further violations of U.S. copyright law.
“Within the first 24 hours of SeaDance 2.0, social media users have already used the platform to spark a brawl that never happened between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, rewrite the ending of Stranger Things, and stage a battle between Thanos and Superman on the surface of Mars,” the senators wrote. “These were not obscure experiments, but viral moments, racking up millions of views and openly and enthusiastically celebrating the theft of America’s creative work. One content creator shared a comparison between a clip from the movie ‘F1’ and a near-exact copy produced by Seadance, and claimed that the AI model had replicated the most expensive shot in the movie for 9 cents. 9 cents.”
AI-generated viral battle scenes cruise and pit As of the end of February, it has been viewed more than 7 million times. The content, created by Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson using ByteDance’s SeaDance 2.0 AI tool, consists of several short clips that have gone viral on social media platforms such as X and Instagram since around February 12.
Welch and Blackburn said global companies must abide by the law and respect core economic rights, including the protection of intellectual property and personal likeness.
They allege that ByteDance has demonstrated a willingness to violate U.S. federal law and steal the intellectual property of U.S. creators for its own financial gain, without making any effort to license training materials or prevent illegal and infringing output.
“[The AI software] “This poses a direct threat to America’s intellectual property system and, more broadly, to the constitutional rights and economic livelihoods of our creative community. The reckless manner in which Seadance 2.0 was released with no regard for the rights of creators has been rightly condemned by multiple creative community stakeholders and experts, and now, rightly, in our view, faces massive litigation risk due to industrial-scale copyright infringement and deepfake abuse,” they wrote. This is the result. ”
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