Paramount Skydance has become the latest major Hollywood studio to accuse ByteDance of illegally exploiting copyrighted material to train and power its artificial intelligence tools, escalating an industrywide backlash against generative AI models tied to the Chinese tech giant.
In a cease-and-desist letter seen by TheWrap and sent to ByteDance Chief Executive Liang Rubo, attorneys for Paramount demanded that the company immediately halt any use of Paramount-owned content in its AI systems and remove allegedly infringing material from its platforms.
“It is self-evident that our company’s intellectual property was used to train the models that underlie these tools. Such training was also done without our consent and is a violation of the law,” the letter states. It insists that Paramount content is not used to train or generate material through ByteDance’s Seed platforms and that any infringing results generated on the company’s systems be taken down.
The letter targets ByteDance’s Seedance and Seedream tools, which the company markets as image- and video-generation products that create content in response to user prompts. Paramount alleges that the tools routinely produce imagery and video closely resembling the studio’s well-known franchises and characters.
According to the letter, the allegedly infringed properties include South Park, SpongeBob SquarePants, Star Trek, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Godfather, Dora the Explorer and Avatar: The Last Airbender. The studio also asserted that its intellectual property was used without permission to train the underlying AI models.
Paramount said it objects to the use of its protected works both as training material and as outputs generated by the models without explicit authorization.
The move follows a similar action by Disney, which sent ByteDance a cease-and-desist letter on Friday alleging infringement of a wide range of properties, including Star Wars, Marvel titles and Family Guy.
The studios’ complaints come amid growing concern in Hollywood over the rapid advancement of generative AI tools capable of producing high-quality video, particularly with the recent rollout of Seedance 2.0. The Motion Picture Association and the Human Artistry Campaign issued statements last week criticizing ByteDance and warning that unauthorized use of copyrighted works to train AI systems threatens creative industries.
ByteDance has not publicly responded to the Paramount letter. The dispute adds to mounting legal and regulatory pressure on AI developers as entertainment companies push to protect their intellectual property in the face of increasingly sophisticated generative technologies.
