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Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt face off in hand-to-hand combat on a rubble-strewn rooftop; Donald Trump takes on kung-fu fighters in a bamboo forest; Kanye West dances through a Chinese imperial palace while singing in Mandarin.

Over the past week, a series of cinematic videos of celebrities and characters in absurd situations have gone viral online, with one thing in common: They were created using a new artificial intelligence tool from Chinese developer ByteDance, raising anxiety over the rapidly evolving capabilities of AI.

The new model, called Seedance 2.0, is one of the most advanced of its kind and has quickly received praise for its ease of use and the realistic nature of the videos it can generate in minutes.

But shortly after the premiere, media giants Paramount and Disney sent cease-and-desist letters to ByteDance — the company most famous for developing the video-sharing app TikTok — accusing it of infringing on their intellectual property. Hollywood’s main trade organization, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPA), and the SAG-AFTRA union also condemned the company for unauthorized use of American copyrighted works.

ByteDance responded with a statement saying it would implement better safeguards to protect intellectual property.

Seedance 2.0 has quickly become the most controversial model in a wave of them launched by Chinese tech companies this year, as competition to dominate the AI ​​industry intensifies.

The Chinese government has made advanced technology a fundamental pillar of its national development strategy. In a televised Lunar New Year celebration this week, the country’s newest humanoid robots stole the show with their martial arts displays, spinning kicks and backflips.

These improvements are often received with concern, particularly in the United States, China’s main technological and political rival, in a spiral of superiority reminiscent of its 20th century “space race” with the Soviet Union.

“There is a kind of nationalistic fervor around who will win the AI ​​race,” said Ramesh Srinivasan, a professor of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. “That’s part of what we see over and over again when this news is published.”

Here’s why ByteDance’s latest technology has shaken the world.

The AI ​​video generation model, while not yet publicly available to everyone, was hailed by many as the most sophisticated of its kind to date, using images, audio, video and text to quickly generate short scenes with polished characters and motion editing control at a lower cost.

“My glass-half-empty view is that Hollywood is about to be revolutionized/decimated,” wrote writer and producer Rhett Reese, who worked on the Deadpool film franchise, on X after watching Cruise and Pitt’s video.

A Chinese tech blogger using Seedance 2.0 claimed it was so advanced that it could generate realistic audio of your voice based solely on an image of you, raising fears about deepfakes and privacy. ByteDance later removed that feature and introduced verification requirements for users who want to create digital avatars with their own images and audio, according to Chinese media.

Rogier Creemers, an associate professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands who researches China’s domestic technology policy, said part of the concern is due to the rapid pace at which Chinese companies have launched new iterations of AI technology this year.

That has also put China at a disadvantage when it comes to assessing the potential negative impacts of each improvement, he said.

“The more powerful these apps become, the more potentially harmful they become,” Creemers said. “It’s a bit like a car. If you build a car that can drive faster, it will get you where you need to be much faster, but it also means you can crash sooner.”

Following the Hollywood protests, ByteDance said in a statement that it respects intellectual property rights and will strengthen safeguards against unauthorized use of intellectual property and images on its platform, although it did not specify how.

User complaints prompted ByteDance’s recent rollback and also forced popular Chinese Instagram-like app RedNote to restrict any AI-created content that has not been properly tagged.

And the arrival of Seedance 2.0 coincides with a tightening of regulations for AI content in China.

China’s domestic regulation of AI surpasses the efforts of most other countries in the world, thanks in part to its entrenched censorship apparatus. Last week, the Cyberspace Administration of China announced it was cracking down on unlabeled AI-generated content, penalizing more than 13,000 accounts and removing hundreds of thousands of posts.

However, restrictions on AI-generated content on the Chinese internet are often applied unevenly, Nick Corvino wrote in ChinaTalk, a China-focused newsletter. Corvino attributed the problem in part to difficulties in controlling content across different apps, as well as incentives from tech companies to encourage user content.

“With Chinese social media platforms locked in fierce competition, both with each other and with the Western market, none want to be the strictest, while others let content flow freely,” he said in a post after the launch of Seedance 2.0.

According to analysts, China is walking a fine line between encouraging domestic development of AI models and maintaining strict controls over how those models are used.

“AI professionals always said that what the Chinese government is doing is slowing down its development,” said Creemers of Leiden University. “Obviously, a content control system like the Chinese one, which basically limits production, is never pleasant.”

Pressure to stop using certain images or data, whether from American media giants or other sources, could also affect efforts to perfect AI. Disney accused ByteDance of illegally using its intellectual property to train Seedance 2.0, but recently reached a deal with US company OpenAI to give Sora (OpenAI’s video generation model and Seedance competitor) access to trademarked characters such as Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

“These agreements have a lot to do with the type of data that they will have access to, that they otherwise wouldn’t have access to, or that their competitors wouldn’t have access to,” said UCLA’s Srinivasan. “There is a high probability that Sora products could be more refined and advanced if the data is better suited for models to learn from.”

At the same time, restrictions on how AI can be used or trained could also spur greater innovation, he said, highlighting how Chinese company DeepSeek, blessed with a much smaller budget than industry leaders, built a competitive AI-powered chatbot.

“When it comes to Chinese advances in AI, the DeepSeek revelation was very important because it showed that there are other ways to train linguistic models in more economical ways,” he said.