Hollywood organizations are pushing back against a new AI video model called Seedance 2.0, which they say has quickly become a tool for “blatant” copyright infringement.

ByteDance, the Chinese company that recently finalized a deal to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations (it retains a stake in the new joint venture), launched Seedance 2.0 earlier this week.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the updated model is currently available to Chinese users of ByteDance’s Jianying app, and the company says it will soon be available to global users of its CapCut app.

Similar to tools such as OpenAI’s Sora, Seedance allows users to create videos (currently limited to 15 seconds in length) by just entering a text prompt. And like Sora, Seedance quickly drew criticism for an apparent lack of guardrails around the ability to create videos using the likeness of real people, as well as studios’ intellectual property.

After one X user posted a brief video showing Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt, which they said was created by “a 2 line prompt in seedance 2,” “Deadpool” screenwriter Rhett Reese responded, “I hate to say it. It’s likely over for us.”

The Motion Picture Association soon issued a statement from CEO Charles Rivkin demanding that ByteDance “immediately cease its infringing activity.”

“In a single day, the Chinese AI service Seedance 2.0 has engaged in unauthorized use of U.S. copyrighted works on a massive scale,” Rivkin said. “By launching a service that operates without meaningful safeguards against infringement, ByteDance is disregarding well-established copyright law that protects the rights of creators and underpins millions of American jobs.”

The Human Artistry Campaign — an initiative backed by Hollywood unions and trade groups — condemned Seedance 2.0 as “an attack one very creator around the world,” while the actors’ union SAG-AFTRA said it “stands with the studios in condemning the blatant infringement enabled by Bytedance’s new AI video model Seedance 2.0.”

Seedance videos have apparently featured Disney-owned characters such as Spider-Man, Darth Vader, and Grogu, better known as Baby Yoda, prompting the company to take legal action. Axios reports that Disney has sent a cease-and-desist letter accusing ByteDance of a “virtual smash-and-grab of Disney’s IP”and claiming the Chinese company is “hijacking Disney’s characters by reproducing, distributing, and creating derivative works featuring those characters.”

Disney isn’t necessarily opposed to working with AI companies — while it has reportedly sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google over similar issues, it’s signed a three-year licensing deal with OpenAI.

TechCrunch has reached out to ByteDance for comment.

Much has changed for Jenny Wang, the founder who’s bringing “Clueless” fashion tech to life. 

Last year, her company, Alta, raised $11 million in a round led by Menlo Ventures to let users create digital closets and try on their clothes with their own virtual avatars. It’s a tech once seen only in movies, most notably in “Clueless,” where Cher styles and plans her outfits using computer technology. Alta is similar to that, allowing users to plan and style outfits using the latest AI innovations.

A slew of big names participated in Atla’s round last year, including models Jasmine Tookes and Karlie Kloss, Anthropic’s VC arm Anthology Fund, and Rent the Runway cofounder Jenny Fleiss. 

TechCrunch caught up with Wang during New York Fashion Week to talk about how the company has expanded since that round.

For starters, the product is officially in the app store; Time and Vogue named it one of the best innovations of last year, and Wang said more than 100 million outfits have been generated on the platform since its launch in 2023.  It has partnerships with Poshmark and the Council of Fashion Designers of America, with more partnerships to be announced soon.

“Alta’s own app also features thousands of brands that users can shop from,” Wang said. 

Right now, the company is focused on building app and website integration experiences for brands, she said, where customers can try on a designer’s clothing using a personalized Alta Avatar. This week, the company unveiled its first integration collaboration, teaming up with Public School, a storied New York City brand. 

“Shoppers can style looks from the new collection on their own Alta avatar,” Wang said. 

She met the Public School team — Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne — through the founder of Poshmak, who is also an angel investor in both companies. 

“Public School designers Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne had been looking for an AI partner and virtual try-on avatar solution, and Dao-Yi has been an Alta app user himself,” Wang said. 

Public School actually went on hiatus for a few years, with this NYFW marking its grand re-debut. When asked, the founders of the brand said they rediscovered their voices and what they wanted to say.

“We have to look at tech as a partner in the business today,” Chow told TechCrunch, adding, “It’s not 2015 anymore,” so the team wants to take advantage of the latest technological developments. “We want to be thoughtful on how we use tech and AI,” he continued, “not as a design tool but as a tool to extend our storytelling and a tool to interact with the consumer and have them experience the brand even if they can’t do so in person.”

Wang said this is one of the first instances of a designer embedding personal avatar and styling technology into its own website. Near the bottom of Public School’s product page, there is an icon that says Style by Alta. Clicking that takes the customer to Alta for them to then style their avatars and test out how Public School clothing would look on them, should they purchase. 

Users on Alta’s standalone app can also access Public School through Alta’s app. Wang said the goal is for Alta to integrate more experiences like this into other brands and websites, so Alta users can try on clothes on other websites even while outside the Alta app. 

“Right now, a user would have to add a potential purchase into their Alta wishlist, then style outfits and try on their avatar, versus being able to do that directly on the brand website.” (For every site but Public School, that is.) “The goal is to bring their community on a new journey to engage with and shop the brand.” 

Many major fashion brands, like Zara and Balmain, have already experimented with digital avatars. Wang said what makes Alta different here, especially compared to Zara, is that Alta avatars can put on at least 8 items within seconds, whereas Zara avatars can wear only four and often take around two minutes. 

Overall, demand for virtual avatars has increased. Wang considers Alta both still the “Cluless”  technology that it started out with, and a digital avatar business. 

“The consumer Alta app is the ‘Clueless’ closet, while the enterprise Alta experience allows shoppers to style pieces and try the outfits on their pre-existing Alta avatar,” he said. Eventually, Wang said she wants Alta to be the “personal identity layer for the future of consumer AI and shopping.”

For agentic commerce to truly work, she said, “We need a data layer that understands the shopper’s style preferences, such as their closet, past purchases, and their avatar, likeness, and body, which is Alta.”

Much of Silicon Valley has spent years chasing mega-rounds and buzzy AI deals. Meanwhile, Stacy Brown-Philpot is running Cherryrock Capital like a throwback to venture capital’s earlier days, writing smaller Series A and B checks to founders that larger firms routinely overlook.

The former TaskRabbit CEO and decade-long Google veteran launched Cherryrock a year ago after seeing what she calls a persistent gap: access to capital for “underinvested entrepreneurs” building software companies at the crucial growth stage.

“When I left TaskRabbit, I took some time off to figure out what was next and saw this gap in the market, which was access to capital, particularly for underinvested entrepreneurs,” Brown-Philpot told TechCrunch. She’d originally come to the Bay Area 25 years ago, planning to become a VC and even writing her Stanford Business School essay about it. After spending a decade at Google and leading TaskRabbit to a successful exit to IKEA, she’s finally back to that original plan.

She circled back to it for a reason. Before launching Cherryrock, Brown-Philpot was a member of the investment committee for the SoftBank Opportunity Fund, a $100 million vehicle started in 2020 to back underserved entrepreneurs. That experience proved there was no shortage of overlooked founders.

SoftBank itself sold the Opportunity Fund to its leadership team in late 2023, divesting from the diversity-focused initiative. Brown-Philpot, meanwhile, doubled down, and launched her own fund. By the time she closed Cherryrock’s debut fund in February 2025, she already had more than 2,000 companies in her pipeline. 

Cherryrock is targeting 12 to 15 investments from its first fund — a concentrated approach and stark contrast to the seed funds that make dozens of bets, or massive funds that write nine-figure checks. Brown-Philpot’s also taking her time; a year after announcing the fund, she and her team, including cofounder Saydeah Howard, who spent nine years at the venture firm IVP, have backed just five companies, putting them about a third of the way toward their goal. In an era when many funds race to deploy capital almost as quickly as it’s raised, Brown-Philpot’s measured pace is another throwback to an earlier generation of VCs.

Brown-Philpot’s focus on “underinvested” founders — a careful choice of words in today’s political climate — means backing entrepreneurs who might not fit the typical Silicon Valley mold.

When asked directly about the current political environment, where DEI has become a lightning rod, Brown-Philpot is unfazed. “It doesn’t change the pitch at all,” she said. “When we look at the people who decided to back Cherryrock, like JPMorgan and Bank of America…these are financial institutions who expect to generate a return. Our job as investors is to do just that.”

In addition to those investors, Cherryrock’s LP roster includes Goldman Sachs Asset Management, MassMutual, Top Tier Capital Partners, and Melinda Gates’s Pivotal Ventures. Some of these have stepped back from explicit diversity pledges amid pressure from the Trump administration. Yet Brown-Philpot may find herself in an unexpectedly advantageous position. 

A new diversity reporting law in California requires VC firms with a California nexus to report demographic data on their portfolio companies’ founding teams, with the first deadline in April. Unlike some corporate diversity initiatives that have faced legal challenges, the law focuses on transparency rather than mandates, requiring reporting but not quotas. For a firm like Cherryrock that’s already tracking and prioritizing investments in diverse founders, compliance is “table stakes,” as Brown-Philpot puts it. “You accomplish what you measure.”

Brown-Philpot’s perspective is informed by her vantage point across multiple institutions. Beyond Cherryrock, she sits on the boards of HP, StockX, and Stanford University — roles that give her insight into both enterprise buyers and the next generation of founders. At Stanford, she’s watching students navigate questions about AI’s impact on employment. “What I see on campus is the students are charting a path and finding a way to create opportunities for themselves,” she said.

Her portfolio reflects her thesis. One investment is Coactive AI, led by Cody Coleman, an MIT grad with advanced degrees in philosophy and engineering from MIT and Stanford. The company provides multimodal AI infrastructure to the media and entertainment industry, a sector now under intense scrutiny following controversies around AI-generated content. Cherryrock led Coactive’s Series B alongside Emerson Collective.

Another bet is Vitable Health, founded by Joseph Kitonga, a Thiel Fellow and Y Combinator alum. The Philadelphia-based company provides on-demand, primary care-based health insurance to employers and hourly workers – the kind of population Brown-Philpot came to know well as the CEO of TaskRabbit during its last years as a standalone company. Kitonga “is the exact kind of founder that we want to back,” Brown-Philpot said. “He does what he says he’s going to do.” Brown-Philpot first invested at the seed stage of Vitable through her work with the SoftBank Opportunity Fund.

When asked about her operating philosophy, Brown-Philpot is pragmatic about exits. “It’s very difficult to go public,” she said. “Most companies don’t go public, they do get acquired.” It’s a refreshingly honest take in an industry that often overpromises on IPO prospects. She points to TaskRabbit’s sale to IKEA as proof that the right acquisition can create lasting value.

As for 2026, Brown-Philpot’s priority is simple: “We are actively deploying capital.” She’s looking for Series A and B companies that have achieved product-market fit at scale, letting founders define what that means. And while the broader venture ecosystem debates the future of diversity initiatives, she is focused on finding great founders, wherever they are.

“I’m from Detroit,” she says. “Hard things are hard, but we know how to do hard things.”