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ByteDance Signs AI Copyright Pact With Hollywood Trade Group

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ByteDance has reached an agreement with the Motion Picture Association (MPA) to strengthen copyright protections across its AI-powered video and image-generation tools.

The agreement covers ByteDance’s Seedance video model and Seedream image-generation system, both of which have faced criticism from Hollywood studios over their ability to create content featuring copyrighted characters and celebrity likenesses.

The pact follows a cease-and-desist letter sent by the MPA earlier this year after companies including Disney raised concerns that ByteDance’s generative AI tools could reproduce protected film and television content without authorization.

ByteDance said newer versions of its models now include stronger intellectual-property safeguards. The technology is available across several company services, including TikTok, CapCut and Dreamina.

Both ByteDance and the MPA said they plan to continue working together as generative AI technology evolves, with a focus on improving protections for copyrighted material.

The agreement reflects growing pressure on AI companies to develop more effective controls around intellectual property as image and video generation tools become increasingly realistic and widely used.

Anthropic Reaches $1.5B Settlement With Authors Over AI Training

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Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit from authors who accused the company of using pirated books to train its AI chatbot Claude, according to a filing in San Francisco federal court on Friday. The settlement, which still requires judicial approval, is being described by plaintiffs as the largest copyright recovery in history and the first major resolution of its kind in the AI era.

Under the deal, Anthropic will destroy downloaded copies of more than 7 million pirated books stored in a central library and establish a $1.5 billion fund—equivalent to about $3,000 per 500,000 downloaded works, though the amount could rise if more books are identified. While the settlement ends claims over the copying of works for training, it leaves open potential future lawsuits regarding AI-generated outputs.

The lawsuit, filed last year by authors including Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, alleged that Anthropic—backed by Amazon and Alphabet—unlawfully scraped millions of books from pirate sites to build Claude’s training dataset.

Judge William Alsup previously ruled that Anthropic’s use of the works for model training qualified as fair use, but storing the pirated material in a central database violated copyright law. A trial scheduled for December could have exposed Anthropic to damages in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Author advocates hailed the agreement. The Authors Guild’s CEO, Mary Rasenberger, called it “a vital step in acknowledging that AI companies cannot simply steal authors’ creative work to build their AI.”

The case is a watershed moment in the ongoing legal battles between AI developers and copyright holders, with other high-profile cases against OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta still pending. Courts remain divided on whether training AI on copyrighted content constitutes fair use, ensuring the debate is far from over.