If you’ve been eagerly waiting to try ByteDance’s new Seedance 2.0 video model, but don’t have the necessary prerequisites (a phone number with country code +86 and an account on a Chinese ByteDance platform), it looks like you’ll have to keep waiting.
According two anonymous leakers who spoke with the InformationThe global rollout of Seedance 2.0 is on hold amid legal action by movie studios and streaming services.
When it was initially released, Seedance 2.0 appeared to have little to no protections to prevent users from generating videos featuring celebrities, copyrighted characters, and celebrities as copyrighted characters.
As I pointed out last monthThis model is just the latest of many to spark copyright disputes that only seem to help them make a splash, this time primarily from Disney, which has a content partnership with ByteDance competitor OpenAI.
Every new generative model that goes viral seems to have a particularly surprising use case, like the gibli memes which 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 are held together with physics and C-minus continuity (rather than F-less physics and continuity we expect).
In one famous case, an X user posted a Seedance 2.0 video that appeared to show a fight between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. Another clip with Cruise and Pitt turned the fight into a reference to Jeffrey Epstein and was notable for drawing attention to the model’s shaky grasp of imitating celebrity voices.
This was a 2 line post on Seedance 2. If Hollywood is cooked, the kids are right, maybe Hollywood is cooked, the kids are too cooked, I don’t know. 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 dedicate our careers and our lives to it, I think it’s nothing short of terrifying,” adding: “I can see this is costing jobs everywhere.”
A little over a week ago, a Reddit account associated with AI cloud company Atlas Cloud provided what it claimed to be some details directly from ByteDance regarding the public availability of Seedance 2.0. The launch was supposed to be “before mid-March, but there is 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 has reached out to ByteDance for a statement and will update it if we hear back.
