Senators Marsha Blackburn and Peter Welch told ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo on Monday to immediately shut down Seedance 2.0, the company's AI video generator that has been churning out clips of Hollywood actors and copyrighted characters since its February 12 launch. The bipartisan letter, first obtained by CNBC, called the tool the most obvious case of copyright infringement from any ByteDance product to date.
ByteDance had already paused Seedance 2.0's planned global rollout days earlier, after a pile-up of cease-and-desist letters from Disney, Paramount, and the Motion Picture Association. The senators weren't impressed. They dismissed the company's pledge to strengthen safeguards as a "delay tactic."
Nine cents and a fake Tom Cruise
The letter cited specific examples that went viral within hours of Seedance 2.0 going live in China: a fabricated fight between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, a fan-rewritten ending to Stranger Things, and a crossover brawl between Marvel's Thanos and DC's Superman. Millions of views. Zero licenses.
But the detail that probably worries Hollywood most isn't any single clip. One creator claimed they recreated the most expensive shot from the 2025 film F1 for nine cents. That's the kind of number that makes studio accountants lose sleep, even if the actual output quality is debatable. Software developer Aron Peterson questioned whether the viral Cruise/Pitt fight was purely AI-generated or used a video-to-video workflow behind the scenes, noting that Seedance's own website showcases examples shot with stuntmen against green screens.
That skepticism matters. The gap between "AI replaces Hollywood" and "AI makes a pretty good rough draft" is enormous, but it doesn't change the copyright question one bit.
The regulatory vacuum
Blackburn chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law. She and Welch introduced the TRAIN Act last August alongside Senators Hawley and Schiff, a bill that would let copyright holders subpoena AI companies to find out if their work was used in training data. It hasn't passed.
Congress has mostly avoided writing AI rules. The stated reason: they don't want to hobble American companies while competitors catch up. Several lawmakers have acknowledged that draft legislation from a few years ago would already be obsolete given advances in agentic AI. President Trump signed an executive order in December that effectively froze federal AI regulatory efforts, which makes the current letter to ByteDance feel less like policy and more like performance.
"Responsible global companies follow the law and respect core economic rights, including intellectual property and personal likeness protections," the senators wrote. That's true, as far as it goes. But American AI companies aren't exactly paragons here either. OpenAI faced similar backlash over its Sora video generator and shifted to an opt-in model last October, requiring rightsholder authorization before generating content using their IP. The fact that ByteDance is Chinese makes for an easier political target.
What ByteDance actually said
The company's response could have been generated by a corporate PR chatbot: "ByteDance respects intellectual property rights and we have heard the concerns regarding Seedance 2.0. We are taking steps to strengthen current safeguards as we work to prevent the unauthorized use of intellectual property and likeness by users." No specifics on what those steps are or when they'd take effect.
Seedance 2.0 remains available to users in mainland China through ByteDance's Jimeng, Doubao, and Xiaoyunque apps. The global API rollout that was supposed to happen in mid-March is on hold indefinitely. Actor Scott Adkins spotted what appeared to be his own likeness in a Seedance-generated clip and posted on X: "I don't remember shooting this."
Blackburn and Welch want ByteDance to shut Seedance down entirely and remove unlicensed intellectual property from its training data. Whether a strongly worded letter accomplishes that, without actual legislation behind it, is the question nobody in Congress seems eager to answer.
