According to two unnamed leakers who spoke to The Information, the global release of Seadance 2.0 is on hold amid legal action from film studios and streaming services.
When it was initially released, it appeared that SeeDance 2.0 had no protections to prevent users from creating videos that star celebrities, copyrighted characters, and celebrities appearing as copyrighted characters.
As I noted last month, this model is the latest of several to trigger copyright disputes that only help them make a splash – this time most prominently from Disney, which has a content partnership with ByteDance competitor OpenAI.
It seems like every new generator model that goes viral has a particularly eyebrow-raising use case, like the Ghibli memes following the release of OpenAI’s GPT-4O. In the case of Seidance 2.0, that use case has largely been John Wick-style action sequences coupled with C-minus physics and continuity (the F-minus physics and continuity are what we’ve come to expect).
In one famous example, an Another clip with Cruise and Pitt turned the fight into a Jeffrey Epstein reference, and was notable for drawing attention to the models’ weak grasp on celebrity voice imitations.
This was a 2 line prompt in Sedans 2. If Hollywood is ripe then people are right maybe Hollywood is ripe and people are too, idk. pic.twitter.com/dNTyLUIwAV
– Ruairi Robinson (@RuairiRobinson) 11 February 2026
According to the New York Times, Deadpool writer Rhett Reese said, “For all of us who work in the industry and dedicate our careers and lives to it, I think this is nothing short of horrific,” adding, “I can see this costing jobs everywhere.”
About a week ago, a Reddit account associated with AI cloud company Atlas Cloud provided some details about the public availability of SeeDance 2.0 in what it claimed was direct from ByteDance. The release was “slated to take place 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 restrictions and copyright compliance work, so the timeline depends on that.”
Gizmodo has contacted ByteDance for a statement, and will update if we hear back.
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