If you’ve been anxiously waiting to try ByteDance’s new video model Seedance 2.0, but don’t have the necessary prerequisites (a phone number with country code +86 and an account on the Chinese ByteDance platform), it looks like you’ll just have to keep waiting.
Seedance 2.0’s global release is on hold due to lawsuits from movie studios and streaming services, according to two anonymous leakers who spoke to The Information.
When it was first released, Seedance 2.0 appeared to have few protections to prevent users from generating videos featuring celebrities, copyrighted characters, or celebrities as copyrighted characters.
As I pointed out last month, this model is just the latest of many that have sparked copyright disputes, and it only seems to be helping to garner buzz, most notably this time from Disney, which has a content partnership with ByteDance competitor OpenAI.
Every new generative model that goes viral, such as the Ghibli meme that emerged following the release of OpenAI’s GPT-4o, seems to have a particularly eyebrow-raising use case. In the case of Seedance 2.0, its use case was primarily John Wick-style action scenes with C-minus physics and continuity (rather than the F-minus physics and continuity we’ve come to expect).
In a famous example, an X user posted a Seedance 2.0 video that appeared to show Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise doing a knockdown dragout. Another clip of Cruise and Pitt was notable for turning a fight into a reference to Jeffrey Epstein and drawing attention to the model’s shaky grasp on celebrity voice imitation.
This was a two-line prompt in Seadance 2. If Hollywood is cooked, then maybe everyone is right. If Hollywood is cooked, everyone is overcooked. pic.twitter.com/dNTyLUIwAV
— Ruairi Robinson (@RuairiRobinson) February 11, 2026
“I think this is nothing short of terrifying for all of us who work in this industry and have dedicated our careers and our lives to it,” Deadpool screenwriter Rhett Reese said, according to the New York Times, adding, “You can see that it’s costing jobs everywhere.”
About a week ago, a Reddit account associated with AI cloud company Atlas Cloud claimed to have been provided details about the Seedance 2.0 rollout directly from ByteDance. Release is “scheduled for mid-March, but there is no firm date yet.” And the account pointed to the same information, saying that the ByteDance team is “still finalizing content restrictions and copyright compliance work, so the schedule will depend on that.”
Gizmodo has asked ByteDance for a statement and will update if we hear back.
