If you’ve been looking forward to trying out ByteDance’s new video model, Seedance 2.0, but you don’t have the necessary prerequisites – a phone number with a +86 country code and an account on the Chinese ByteDance platform – it looks like you’ll have to keep waiting.
according to Two anonymous leakers spoke to the informationThe global release of Seedance 2.0 is being held up amid legal action from movie studios and streaming services.
In the initial release, Seedance 2.0 had any protections to prevent users from creating videos that appear to be celebrities, copyrighted characters, and copyrighted characters.
As I mentioned last monthit’s the latest model to hit a copyright controversy that’s helping them make some noise — this time, it’s from Disney. ByteDance has a content partnership with rival OpenAI.
Every new generative model that goes viral has some particularly eyebrow-raising use cases, such as Memories of Ghibli After the release of OpenAI’s GPT-4o. In the case of Seedance 2.0, this use case has mostly been John Wick style action scenes Combined with C-minus physics and durability (instead of F-minus physics and durability we expect).
In one famous example, an X user posted a Seedance 2.0 video of what appeared to be a fallout between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. Another clip with Cruise and Pitt The fight turned into a reference to Jeffrey Epstein, drawing attention to the model’s shaky perception of celebrity voiceovers.
This was a 2-line instruction in Sedance 2. If hollywood is cooked, children are right, maybe hollywood is cooked, children are cooked too much. pic.twitter.com/dNTyLUIwAV
— Ruairi Robinson (@RuairiRobinson) February 11, 2026
Deadpool writer Rhett Rise said: According to the New York Times“For all of us who work in the industry and dedicate our careers and lives to it, I don’t think it’s a terrible thing,” he added, adding, “I could see it costing jobs everywhere.”
A little over a week ago, a The Reddit account is associated with AI cloud company Atlas Cloud what he claimed were some details directly from ByteDance about the availability of Seedance 2.0 to the public. The release was supposed to be “before mid-March,” but there’s no confirmed date yet. And that account noted the same thing as Information: 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 if we hear back.
