Reuters could not immediately confirm this report. ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Last month, ByteDance announced it would take steps to prevent unauthorized use of intellectual property in its AI video generator SeaDance 2.0, following threats of lawsuits from U.S. studios including Disney.
Last month, Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to the Chinese company, accusing it of using Disney characters for training and power-ups without permission after a video generated by the Seadance 2.0 model, which included a brawl between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, went viral in China.
Disney said ByteDance provided SeaDance with a pre-packaged and pirated library of copyrighted characters from series such as Star Wars and Marvel that were depicted as public domain clip art. ByteDance, which officially announced the model in February, said the system is aimed at use in professional film, e-commerce and advertising, highlighting its ability to process text, images, audio and video all at once to reduce content production costs.
Seedance 2.0 gained attention after being compared to DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company that has built models comparable to Anthropic and OpenAI. Technology executives, including Elon Musk, have praised its ability to generate cinematic stories from a small number of prompts.
ByteDance had aimed to make the new video model available to customers around the world in mid-March, but the company has since scrapped those plans, according to a report in The Information.
ByteDance’s legal team is working to identify and resolve potential legal issues, and engineers are adding safeguards to prevent the model from generating content that could lead to further intellectual property infringement, the report added.
