Worth Knowing

The Seedance 2.0 video model is a ByteDance product. The official ByteDance Seedance project page lives at seed.bytedance.com. The model is available to creators through ByteDance’s Jimeng AI app (in China), Dreamina, and CapCut.

None of those is the site we tracked this week.

The site we spotted change in is seedance2.ai. It markets itself as offering Seedance 2.0 video generation. Its newly-updated privacy policy contains an unambiguous no-training pledge:

Your data is never used to train AI models. We do not use your prompts, uploaded content, or generated videos to train, fine-tune, or otherwise improve any AI model. Content you submit is processed solely to deliver the requested generation result back to you.

It is also the kind of pledge that rewards a closer read. The policy names no corporate operator — only “Seedance2.ai” and “we.” There is no company name,

no DPO contact, no physical address, no jurisdiction disclosed. The only contact is an email at the same domain. Elsewhere in the same document, the policy admits the site uses third-party “AI model hosting” to deliver results — meaning your prompts and uploads pass through seedance2.ai’s infrastructure on the way to whoever is actually running the model. The no-training pledge therefore binds seedance2.ai’s own handling of your data, but cannot bind whatever the downstream model host does once the data arrives.

This is not a story about seedance2.ai specifically. It is a story about a pattern. Foundation-model-name domain space is full of sites that use a recognizable model name in their URL, build a wrapper interface around the model via API or partner access, rank highly in Google searches for the model’s name, and publish their own terms and privacy policies. Some of those sites are official. Many are not. Some publish protective language they can deliver on. Some publish protective language that covers only their leg of the data trip. Distinguishing between the two takes more than reading the document.

Why this matters: The legal commitment a user agrees to is a commitment from whoever owns the URL — not necessarily from whoever runs the model. When a wrapper site promises never to train on your data, that promise can be entirely sincere and entirely insufficient at the same time: sincere about the wrapper’s own data handling, insufficient because the data still passes through to a third party whose terms the wrapper has no power to bind. For creators and studios doing due diligence on AI tools, the question to ask is not just “what does the policy say,” but “whose policy is this, and what does the underlying model provider’s policy say.” Both have to clear the bar.

In human terms: A producer Googles “Seedance 2.0” to evaluate it for a project. Three of the top results are wrapper sites with reassuring privacy policies; one is an article about ByteDance’s release; the official ByteDance project page is buried further down. The producer reads the wrapper site’s privacy policy, sees a strong no-training pledge, and decides to upload reference frames for a generation test. The wrapper site honors its pledge. The wrapper site also sends the reference frames to the underlying model host. What happens next is governed by terms the producer never opened. The pledge was real. The protection was partial.