Hollywood’s long-simmering anxiety over generative AI has tipped into open confrontation, with both Disney and Paramount Skydance issuing cease-and-desist letters to China’s ByteDance, accusing the TikTok owner of mass copyright infringement through its Seedance and Seedream AI platforms.
According to letters, the studios allege ByteDance’s generative tools are producing content that is virtually indistinguishable from some of Hollywood’s most recognisable franchises — without permission, licensing, or meaningful safeguards.
Paramount Skydance, in a letter sent Saturday by its head of intellectual property Gabriel Miller to ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo, accused the company of engaging in “blatant infringement” across its AI systems. The studio claims Seedance-generated videos and images unlawfully replicate protected IP including South Park, Star Trek, The Godfather, Dora the Explorer, SpongeBob SquarePants, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Avatar: The Last Airbender.
Miller wrote that “much of the content that the Seed Platforms produce contains vivid depictions of Paramount’s famous and iconic franchises and characters, which are protected under copyright law, trademark law, and the law of unfair competition (among other doctrines).” He added that the output “is often indistinguishable, both visually and audibly,” from Paramount’s original works.
“With the recent release of the Seedance 2.0 video generation tool,” Miller continued, “ByteDance’s infringing activities appear not only to be continuing but becoming more prevalent and the unlawful outputs more widely disseminated.”
The letter demands that “ByteDance immediately take all necessary steps to (i) prevent violations of our intellectual property rights by ensuring that our content is not used or created by ByteDance or the Seed Platforms going forward, and (ii) remove all infringing instances of Paramount’s content from ByteDance’s platforms and systems.”
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The escalation follows a separate cease-and-desist sent by Disney on Friday, targeting Seedance 2.0 for what it described as hosting “a pirated library of Disney’s copyrighted characters from Star Wars, Marvel, and other Disney franchises, as if Disney’s coveted intellectual property were free public domain clip art.”
“ByteDance’s virtual smash-and-grab of Disney’s IP is willful, pervasive, and totally unacceptable,” wrote David Singer, a partner at Jenner & Block, on behalf of the studio.
The backlash comes after Seedance 2.0 outputs went viral across social platforms this week, including hyper-realistic videos depicting Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting on a rooftop, created by filmmaker and VFX artist Rauiri Robinson. The clips set off immediate alarm bells across Hollywood, with the Motion Picture Association calling on ByteDance to “immediately cease its infringing activity.”
“In a single day, the Chinese AI service Seedance 2.0 has engaged in unauthorized use of U.S. copyrighted works on a massive scale,” the MPA said. “By launching a service that operates without meaningful safeguards against infringement, ByteDance is disregarding well-established copyright law that protects the rights of creators and underpins millions of American jobs.”
Actors’ union SAG-AFTRA and the Human Artistry Campaign — a coalition of artist-rights groups — echoed those concerns. The campaign labelled Seedance 2.0 “an attack on every creator around the world. Stealing human creators’ work in an attempt to replace them with AI-generated slop is destructive to our culture: stealing isn’t innovation.”
In response, a ByteDance spokesperson said: “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.”
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The dispute lands amid a broader industry reckoning over AI-generated video. Disney has already taken similar action against Google, with tools like Gemini now rejecting prompts involving Disney-owned characters. At the same time, the company has hedged its bets elsewhere — recently signing a reported $1 billion licensing deal with OpenAI to allow characters to appear in its generative video platform Sora.
For now, ByteDance finds itself at the centre of a growing fault line between Silicon Valley scale and Hollywood authorship — one that’s rapidly turning from viral spectacle into legal battleground.
