After being threatened with legal action by Disney, China’s ByteDance announced Monday that it was taking steps to prevent its AI video-making tool Seedance from using Disney characters without permission. File photo by Alex Plavevski/EPA-EFE
ByteDance, the developer of TikTok, said it will rein in the latest version of its AI video tool, Seedance, after Disney threatened legal action, accusing it of making the studio’s copyrighted characters available to users, including from the Marvel and Star Wars franchises.
The Chinese company told the BBC on Monday that it respected the rights of the owners of intellectual property and was “taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent unauthorized use of intellectual property and likeness by users.”
It did not detail the measures it planned to implement.
ByteDance’s response came three days after lawyers for Disney sent a cease and desist notice alleging ByteDance had provided a “pirated library” of Disney characters for Seedance to use to generate video in what they termed a “virtual smash and grab” of the studio’s intellectual property.
Numerous videos made with Seedance 2.0 have appeared online since it was released on Tuesday, some of which, including one of a “fight” between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, have gone viral.
The technology, which requires minimal inputs — just a few lines of text prompts — to generate professional-looking video has sparked fears it could pose an existential threat to the movie industry.
“I hate to say it. It’s likely over for us,” said U.S. screenwriter and producer Rhett Reese in a post online after watching the Cruise-Pitt clip.
“In next to no time, one person is going to be able to sit at a computer and create a movie indistinguishable from what Hollywood now releases. True, if that person is no good, it will suck. But if that person possesses Christopher Nolan’s talent and taste (and someone like that will rapidly come along), it will be tremendous,” he explained.
Industry bodies representing the Hollywood studios, including Paramount, Warner Bros. and Netflix, and actors, have also demanded ByteDance stop infringing copyright, with the Motion Picture Association saying that by launching a service without proper guardrails ByteDance was “disregarding well-established copyright law that protects the rights of creators and underpins millions of American jobs.”
SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, accused Seedance of “blatant infringement.”
On Friday, the Japanese government opened a copyright infringement investigation into ByteDance after Seedance-generated videos of popular Japanese anime characters began rapidly spreading on social media platforms, coinciding with the launch of the latest version of the app on Tuesday.
Disney and NBCUniversal sued AI image generator Midjourney in 2025, alleging “endless unauthorized copies” of their works.
Google has also been asked by Disney to stop its AI platforms from generating Disney characters.
At the same time, big content producers in the United States are also hedging their bets by making deals and strategic investments in AI.
In December, Disney licensed more than 200 characters to ChatGPT’s Sora video-making tool and announced a $1 billion equity investment in ChatGPT developer OpenAI.
