ByteDance, the Chinese tech giant best known as the parent company of TikTok, has reportedly suspended the global release of its latest video-generation model, Seedance 2.0, amid copyright clashes with Hollywood studios and streaming platforms.

The plans for a mid-March global launch are now on hold, The Information reported on Saturday, citing two people familiar with the matter.

Seedance 2.0 is a multimodal AI video generation model that can create 15-second videos from text, image, audio, and video inputs, combining up to 12 files to generate videos.

Earlier in February, ByteDance pledged to “strengthen current safeguards as [it] works to prevent the unauthorised use of intellectual property and likeness by users” after threats of legal action from Disney.

The entertainment giant sent a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, claiming that it fed Seedance with a "pirated library" of the studio's copyrighted characters from franchises including Star Wars and Marvel. The complaint came after Seedance-generated videos, like the one depicting Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in a ​fight, went viral in China.

Disney is not alone in its complaints. Reportedly, Paramount Skydance has also sent ByteDance a cease-and-desist letter on similar grounds, while The Motion Picture Association, representing US studios like Warner Bros Discovery, Paramount, and Netflix, said that Seedance should "immediately cease its infringing activity".

ByteDance did not disclose what data it uses to train its model.

Seedance 2.0 was officially released on February 12th, 2026, with ByteDance saying that it’s meant for professional film, e-commerce, and advertising use and can help reduce production costs.

The Information report added that the company’s legal team is working to resolve potential legal issues, developing safeguards to prevent the tool from further intellectual property violations.

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