The race to dominate AI video tools is heating up. After Chinese company Kuaishou launched Kling 3.0 last week, ByteDance — the company behind TikTok — has now opened its new video generator, Seedance 2.0, to beta users.

It remains unclear when general audiences will be able to access Seedance 2.0 and whether it will be available in the US, given that ByteDance, which is based in China, had to relinquish most of its TikTok ownership due to security and privacy concerns. So far, Seedance 2.0 is impressing AI enthusiasts, many of whom say it is more advanced than offerings from companies such as OpenAI, which offers video generation through its Sora 2 AI tool. 

A representative for ByteDance didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Video generators are proving to be popular, but companies making these AI tools have faced legal issues and other troubles. Disney and other companies last year sued AI image and video company Midjourney over copyright issues. Kuaishou was recently fined by the Chinese government for failing to curb pornography on its AI platforms.  

(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

The surging interest in Seedance comes almost exactly one year after China's DeepSeek stunned the AI industry with its highly capable R1 chatbot.

What's different about Seedance 2.0

According to information on various ByteDance websites, Seedance 2.0 is an AI video model that will be available across several of its tools, including Dreamina, a creator software suite from its video editing service CapCut.

Seedance can pull together multiple types of clips, such as video, audio and images, generate videos based on a thumbnail of a person's face, and do things that other video generators struggle with, like maintaining consistent character and object features and displaying unified fonts and text.

Some of the examples that have made their way onto social media include realistic-looking dance scenes, martial-arts fights, explosive battles and entire short films generated from a text prompt.

Other AI software such as TopView AI and Atlas Cloud appear to be planning to incorporate Seedance 2.0 into their video-generator suites. On the Atlas Cloud website, Seedance 2.0 AI generation is said to be arriving later this month.