Within hours of its debut in February, ByteDance‘s new AI video generator, Seedance 2.0, was churning out hyperrealistic clips of Brad Pitt brawling with Tom Cruise on a rooftop. Darth Vader dueling Deadpool aboard a starship. Fabricated finales of Game of Thrones. Shrek, Spider-Man, the Stranger Things children, all rendered with startling fidelity and zero permission from the people and studios that created them.
The Motion Picture Association called it copyright infringement “on a massive scale.” And MPA, Disney, Warner Bros., Netflix, Paramount, and Sony fired off cease-and-desist letters. ByteDance, under pressure, eventually suspended the model’s global rollout.
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The Seedance episode was brazen, but it was also familiar. Just weeks earlier, OpenAI had warned Congress that China’s DeepSeek was using increasingly sophisticated methods to extract capabilities from its models, a practice known as “distillation” that essentially lets a smaller model copy the homework of a larger one.
Anthropic followed with its own accusations: DeepSeek, along with Moonshot AI and MiniMax, had generated over 16 million exchanges with its Claude system through roughly 24,000 fraudulent accounts. The goal was to siphon off the reasoning, coding, and tool-use abilities that American labs had spent billions of dollars developing. The White House has taken notice. In a recent memo, the Office of Science and Technology Policy pledged to work with companies to defend against such attacks.
Step back from the technical details and the picture is stark. China is running a two-front campaign against American intellectual property. On one front, Chinese AI labs are plundering the trade secrets and proprietary capabilities of the U.S.’s leading technology companies.
On the other hand, Chinese platforms are strip-mining the creative works of American artists, writers, filmmakers, and musicians. Both represent areas of profound American dominance. Both are under direct, sustained assault.
This is, of course, a pattern that predates artificial intelligence by decades. China has long targeted the industries where the United States leads, from semiconductors to pharmaceuticals to aerospace. The playbook is well-documented: acquire, imitate, undercut. What has changed is the speed and audacity.
In earlier eras, China lured American companies into joint ventures and coerced technology transfers in exchange for market access that rarely materialized. The AI era has dispensed with even that pretense. ByteDance and Minimax did not negotiate with Disney for access to its characters. DeepSeek and Moonshot AI did not license Claude’s capabilities from Anthropic. They simply took what they wanted, reaching beyond China’s borders to plunder American innovation directly.
Washington should pay attention to what’s happening here. Two industries that have historically clashed are facing the same threat; Silicon Valley and Hollywood have been at odds over how AI should be allowed to use copyrighted material domestically. But China’s campaign of theft clarifies what they have in common: both lead the world, both are getting robbed, and both need a government willing to do something about it.
The early returns suggest that even private legal action can move the needle. Cease-and-desist letters from a handful of studios were enough to make ByteDance delay Seedance’s global launch and scramble to implement content filters. If scattered lawsuits from individual American firms can produce that kind of response, imagine what a coordinated, whole-of-government strategy could yield.
The tools are available: targeted sanctions, trade enforcement actions, restrictions on market access, and diplomatic pressure through international IP frameworks. The follow-on negotiations from the recent U.S.-China summit are an opportunity for the White House to raise AI-related IP violations directly. And Congress can and should continue to investigate foreign adversary AI firms’ IP theft and distillation.
Some voices in Washington will argue that the answer to Chinese AI theft is to loosen domestic copyright protections, giving American tech companies blanket “fair use” permission to train on anything they want.
This is precisely the wrong lesson. Weakening IP rights at home undermines any credible case for defending them abroad. You cannot demand that Beijing respect American intellectual property while simultaneously telling American creators that their work is free for the taking. A nation that does not protect its own innovators has no standing to complain when foreign competitors refuse to do so either.
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The Trump administration has pledged to be tough on China and pro-worker on AI. Those commitments converge here. Copyright-protected industries contribute more than $2 trillion to America’s GDP, support millions of jobs, and generate a $37 billion trade surplus. America’s AI companies represent the frontier of technological competition.
Both are worth defending, and both face the same threat. What they need is a government willing to treat Chinese IP theft as the strategic challenge it is, with the full weight of American economic and diplomatic power behind that conviction.
Fred Upton served 36 years in Congress, including as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Mignon Clyburn is a former commissioner and acting chair of the Federal Communications Commission.