If you’ve been waiting anxiously to try out ByteDance’s new video model Seedance 2.0, but you don’t have the necessary prerequisites—a phone number with the +86 country code and an account on a Chinese ByteDance platform—it looks like you’ll just have to keep waiting.
According to two anonymous leakers who spoke to the Information, the global release of Seedance 2.0 is on hold amid legal action from movie studios and streaming services.
When it was initially released, Seedance 2.0 appeared to have few if any protections in place to prevent users from generating videos appearing to star celebrities, copyrighted characters, and celebrities as copyrighted characters.
As I noted last month, this model is just the latest of many to trigger copyright disputes that only seem to help them make a splash—this time most prominently from Disney, which has a content partnership with ByteDance competitor OpenAI.
Every new generative model that goes viral seems to have a particularly eyebrow-raising use case, such as the Ghibli memes that followed the release of OpenAI’s GPT-4o. In the case of Seedance 2.0, that use case has largely been John Wick-style action scenes that hold together with C-minus physics and continuity (instead of the F-minus physics and continuity we’ve come to expect).
In one famous instance, an X user posted a Seedance 2.0 video that appeared to show a knock-down-drag out between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. Another clip with Cruise and Pitt turned the fight into a Jeffrey Epstein reference, and was notable for drawing attention to the model’s shaky grasp on celebrity voice mimicry.
This was a 2 line prompt in seedance 2. If the hollywood is cooked guys are right maybe the hollywood is cooked guys are cooked too idk. pic.twitter.com/dNTyLUIwAV
— Ruairi Robinson (@RuairiRobinson) February 11, 2026
Deadpool writer Rhett Reese said, according to the New York Times, “For all of us who work in the industry and devoted our careers and lives to it, I just think it’s nothing short of terrifying,” adding, “I could just see it costing jobs all over the place.”
A little over a week ago, a Reddit account associated with the AI cloud company Atlas Cloud provided what it claimed was some detail straight from ByteDance about the public availability of Seedance 2.0. The release was meant to be “before mid-March, but no confirmed date yet.” And that account noted the same thing as the Information: that the ByteDance team is “still finalizing content restriction and copyright compliance work, so the timeline depends on that.”
Gizmodo reached out to ByteDance for a statement, and will update if we hear back.
