In a show of bipartisan force, U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.) are demanding that ByteDance immediately shut down its new AI video generation model, Seedance 2.0. In a letter sent Monday to ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo, the lawmakers accused the company of using the platform to facilitate the “theft” of American creative intellectual property on a massive scale.
The senators pointed to the immediate fallout following the model’s February 12 launch. According to the letter, the first 24 hours of Seedance 2.0 saw social media flooded with AI-generated content that utilized protected characters and celebrity likenesses without permission.
Notable examples cited included a fabricated “brawl” between actors Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, an altered ending to the Netflix series Stranger Things, and a digital battle between Superman and Thanos.
One specific instance highlighted in the correspondence involved a content creator who used the AI to recreate a high-budget shot from the movie F1. The senators noted that the model produced a “near-exact copy” of the sequence for just nine cents, bypassing the immense costs associated with the original production.
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“This technology is the most glaring example of copyright infringement from a ByteDance product to date,” the senators wrote. They argued that the Chinese tech giant released the tool without making any attempt to license training materials or implement safeguards to prevent infringing outputs.
The lawmakers dismissed ByteDance’s recent promises to “strengthen current safeguards” as a mere “delay tactic” intended to allow the company to continue profiting from the work of American innovators. The letter suggests that ByteDance is intentionally defying U.S. federal law and Article I of the Constitution, which grants creators exclusive rights to their work.
Beyond the immediate copyright concerns, Blackburn and Welch linked the release of Seedance 2.0 to a broader pattern of intellectual property abuses. They referenced the Trump Administration’s inclusion of China on its “Priority Watch List,” which flags issues such as online piracy and forced technology transfers.
The demand for a shutdown comes as ByteDance faces what the senators described as “massive litigation risk” from stakeholders in the creative community. The lawmakers issued a clear ultimatum: if ByteDance intends to maintain economic relationships with free-market economies, it must cease the operation of Seedance 2.0 and remove all unlicensed intellectual property from its data sets.
Neither ByteDance nor CEO Liang Rubo have issued an official public response to the senators’ specific demand to shutter the platform as of Tuesday afternoon.
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