Paramount has issued a cease-and-desist letter to ByteDance, accusing its AI models Seedance and Seedream of infringing on the studio's intellectual property. The letter joins a similar action by Disney and demands the immediate removal of infringing content. This move highlights growing concerns in Hollywood over unauthorized use of creative works in AI training.
Paramount, in collaboration with Skydance, has become the latest major Hollywood studio to target ByteDance with legal action regarding its AI platforms. On February 15, 2026, the studio sent a warning letter to ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo, based in Beijing, demanding steps to halt the infringement.
The letter, viewed by Deadline, specifies that ByteDance's Seed Platforms—marketed as tools for generating images and videos based on user prompts—are producing content featuring protected elements from Paramount's franchises. Among the properties cited are South Park, SpongeBob SquarePants, Star Trek, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Godfather, Dora the Explorer, and Avatar: The Last Airbender. The attorney for Paramount wrote, “much of the content that the Seed Platforms produce contains vivid depictions of Paramount’s famous and iconic franchises and characters, which are protected under copyright law, trademark law, and the law of unfair competition (among other doctrines).”
Furthermore, the letter asserts that Paramount's intellectual property was used without consent to train these AI models. “To be very clear, Paramount strongly objects to the use of our legally protected works in any of the manners described above—both as inputs trained upon by these types of models and as works that are created by them—without our express authorization,” the letter states. It insists that ByteDance “immediately take all necessary steps to (i) prevent violations of our intellectual property rights by ensuring that our content is not used or created by ByteDance or the Seed Platforms going forward, and (ii) remove all infringing instances of Paramount’s content from ByteDance’s platforms and systems.”
This action follows Disney's cease-and-desist letter sent on Friday, which addressed infringement on properties including Star Wars, Marvel, and Family Guy, particularly with the new Seedance 2.0 video generation tool. Last week, the Motion Picture Association and the Human Artistry Campaign also issued statements criticizing ByteDance's platforms amid rising industry angst over AI-generated content.
